Hawthorn Hill Journal by Richard deRosa

Mixed Musings Amid Turmoil

The peas are in. The bird feeders are down, emptied and stored away until next season. The blower is off the tractor. The trailer with all my traveling garden tools is hitched up and ready to go to work as soon as we return from a brief Florida respite.

Unlike in past years, I have opted for keeping the deck furniture in storage, as well as the gas cooker, until our return at month’s end. Having learned my lesson, putting these things outside on the deck now almost certainly invites a generous snowfall. It also means that I can put off cleaning the cooker until we get back; a chore I dislike now as much as ever. Were it up to me, and it is not, it would sit down at the bottom of the driveway with a big, bold, FREE sign.

There are two schools of thought in the birding world. One sees no harm in keeping feeders available year-round. A proponent of the second option, mine go up when winter really starts up and come down in mid-March. It is an economical decision as well a move based on the belief that all species should satisfy their hunger in ways most natural to them. What sane bird would choose to live solely on a diet of black-oil sunflower seed?

I bought a bag of seed recently as a hedge against what might be prohibitive price increases next year. Even our avian friends might suffer because of this self-inflicted trade war. I wonder if words like “silly” and “childish” are in their vocabulary. As one who lives on a fixed income, a vital component of which is Social Security, expenses need to be reeled in due to the cloud of uncertainty enshrouding our lives right now. In my wildest dreams I never could have imagined conflating legitimate budget concerns with bird food costs. The image of 20-somethings for whom the exigencies of old age are but a flickering, annoying abstraction, rummaging about the halls of the Social Security offices is an unspeakable outrage. Few thoughtful people would question the need for reducing government spending. There is a legitimate argument to be made in favor of cutting back on expensive programs of questionable merit. There is no defensible argument to be made in support of this inhumane massacre we now find ourselves up against. And then there is the chain saw dance. The beat goes on.

There is a connection between pea planting and the buffoonery we witness daily in the name of curtailing government spending. There should not be. When Thoreau planted his beans on the banks of Walden Pond, he could go about with a clear head. If random thoughts crossed his mind, I am sure they would not have included worries over autocratic moves in D.C., the unlawful abrogation of basic civil rights, one individual’s insane thirst for Greenland, the Panama Canal, and any other territory he seems to be licking his chops over.

Unlike Thoreau, when I was out there dropping peas into that cold soil all this other stuff that I should not have to be thinking about tugged and pulled; would not let go. Of course, I have to work on regaining that empty-minded joy I feel when gardening. Not reading or paying attention to the news only works for a few days. It is too much against my natural grain. It also would disappoint the teachers who have had such a lasting impact on my life—and how to conduct it responsibly.

I suspect the common problem we all face is how to go about our daily lives with some semblance of normalcy. It is no doubt easier for me than an immigrant living here legally, or so he or she thought. I can garden, worry about some of this stuff, yet not fear deportation. I can worry about when to take the snow blower off, put the deck furniture out, or plant peas without fear of recrimination because of some viewpoint not shared by the “ruling class.” But I do worry, I hope unnecessarily, about the monthly Social Security check. I also worry about the fates of those thousands of dedicated government employees fired summarily without cause whose lives are irreparably altered. I worry about the fate of a nation founded on such hopeful principles slipping from our grasp.

I look forward to happier days, when planting peas or harvesting peas engenders pleasantly meaningless thoughts. Those raucous town meetings around the country where pissed off people from both sides of the aisle took it to their representatives give me hope that together we will find a way to resolve our differences and work together for the commonweal. My writing has always been guided by this notion; we have much more in common than not.

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.