Hawthorn Hill Journal by Richard deRosa
Of Garlic, Bluebirds, Bees and Yeats
This is a time of year that I always look forward to—garlic harvest and drying time. The act of harvesting the garlic, brushing each bulb and then tying bunches of five together with an extra loop for hanging in the barn, has always been a cathartic, even deeply contemplative time for me. I cannot remember why I’ve stuck with five. It just feels right. And the few times that I have altered the number of each bundle, something within quietly recoils against change, however seemingly insignificant.
Insignificance is a relative term. One thing that aging has reinforced is the discomfort that change can cause, however slight it might seem. I am addled enough by even the merest of alterations of my daily routines. So, one might ask, what do you do if you end up with too few bulbs to make a packet of five? I just take them up to the house, put them in a tray, and let them cure on their own without having to dangle from the barn rafters for several months. Besides, my wife Sandy uses a lot of garlic and has no qualms about breaking the rules by using uncured bulbs. Rule breaking is one of her stronger suits. Not mine. Coward that I am, I am happy to have someone I love deeply to be my rule-breaking surrogate.
This annual garlic adventure of mine turns out to be a time to wrestle, without having to pin them down, some of the more worrisome problems we now face “in these United States.” It is easy to ignore unpleasantness; even harder to know what to do about it. As I was hanging up the last of the garlic, I was thinking of W.B. Yeats’ great poem, “The Second Coming.”
He writes that, “When things fall apart, the center cannot hold…The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” The allusion here is obvious—at least to anyone, no matter their political persuasion, troubled by the nastiness that now cloaks our political discourse. Will the center hold? I hope so. These thoughts are accompanied by the soft warbles of the pair of bluebirds that have been here since early spring. They seem quite attached to the place. They are now raising their second family. A sort of thought concerto was going on, a musical soul balm. Their presence reassured me, at least for the moment, that hope is the only remedy. Otherwise, there is only darkness and doom.
No one has caught hope’s essence more profoundly than Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul. And/sings the tune without the/words, And never stops at all.” My hope is that the best, no matter their ideology, can come together to work to save this democracy we so cherish. And that the unruly, self-serving, hideous passions of the worst among us will dissipate, as is the case with excessively misspent energy.
I was in the garden a few days ago, puzzling over why my lettuce seeds had not germinated. While kneeling down and staring at soil that should have sprouted lettuce some time ago, a bumblebee circled around me, hovered in mid-air for a second or two several inches from my face, then alighted on a sage blossom a foot or so behind me, occupying itself there for several minutes before looking elsewhere for fodder. I recall thinking here we are, two very different species with very different outlooks and needs checking one another out and agreeing that there is room and space for both of us, that there is no reason to dislike or distrust one another just because we are different. We can be different and get along just fine so long as we keep our distance and not interfere with the other’s essential being.
The principles of liberty that J.S. Mill stipulated in “On Liberty” so long ago are not outdated, are not irrelevant, are not applicable to one time but to all times. The bumblebee, and the blue bird and, well, me, are free to live our lives as we wish so long as we do not trample upon the liberties of others. A simple enough formula. In our national discourse, we seem to have forgotten that. We also seem to have forgotten that there is a place for barriers and rules that respect the rights and liberties of individuals. And that there are legitimate functions of government directed at the welfare of the common weal without trampling on the individual freedoms we so revere. We have lost a sense of balance and equilibrium that is essential to the survival of any society. Instead, greed, sycophantism of the worst and most despicable kind, and a willing blindness to the integrity of others’ lives have put us in quite a pickle.
Is there an existential threat to our democracy? I guess we will have to wait and see. I’m betting on the best among us to come through.
Dick deRosa’s Hawthorn Hill essays have appeared in “The Freeman’s Journal” since 1998. A collection, “Hawthorn Hill Journal: Selected Essays,” was published in 2012. He is a retired English teacher.
