It's Wick!

Nearly 60 degrees!  Finally!  For the first time in a long time, we could enjoy being outside, sloshing through mud, reacquainting ourselves with gardens and groves, and beginning one of my favorite springtime chores: Clearing the deadwood to encourage new life.

 Kyra squeals, Anya sprints for the pond, and I plunge into the center of a clump of shrubs, reappearing with an armful of broken, dead, and disconnected limbs and twigs.  My pile of deadwood grows.

 It’s hard work, separating the dead from the living.   It’s heavy work, leaving splinters in your fingers and soreness in muscles long unused.

 It’s heavy work, leaving splinters in your dreams, and soreness in your heart.

 But with deadwood gone, new light shines, new life appears.

 Clear out the dead belief that eating must be done with a fork and spoon! Clear out the dead belief that communication comes only from vocal cords! Clear out the deadwood, invite new life!

 Before we return to the house for more (and more and more) therapy, I gently bend a thin, gray branch near the outer circle of the old mock orange, scratching the surface with my grimy thumbnail, looking for the pale yellow-green of life.  It’s wick!  Alive!  This willowy shrub, five feet around and twice as tall, started out as a single slip, dug from the base of the mock orange that lives in the backyard where I grew up.  That single slip has long since been removed.
Deadwood.

 Yet, like many things, it’s the dying that brings about new life.   It’s wick!  Alleluia!