Hit the Ground Running
Just trying to keep up...
September has an exceptional palette: merlot and ocre, crimini-white and flinty dun. There’s the steel-olive of the local reservoir with its cowl of morning fog and the variegated smoke of the geese’s wings as they beat the restless air over the fields. It’s a time when the birdsong has withdrawn from the morning and what animals haven’t migrated away lumber through the cold, dewy grass at dawn in a glassy silence.
The Classical Roots students and I break that silence every morning in our business, plying gurgling watering cans and sputtering hoses, our hands stinging from the early chill and our breath wafting in furled plumes. Though the cooler weather signals the end of the growing season and the last tomatoes are giving up their wrinkled fruit, there’s still a good many hardy plants to take care of, and even to propagate, that will serve decorative functions well into November. Mums, of course, in as tasteful colors as we can find, Dusty Miller (a personal favorite) with its oceanic fronds of fatigue-green powdered in floury white, and decorative grasses like Karl Foerster nodding their bloated wheat-yellow tufts in the brassy sun.
We have more students involved with the program than ever this year, and it’s a good thing we do, because there is much to take care of. At some point this summer, we seemed to have passed invisibly through a moment of inflection. Before this moment, the Roots program was a somewhat baffling idea. Now, it’s an assumed part of the school’s culture. Requests for courtyard beautifications, plant watering, classroom visits, composting integrations, and leadership opportunities are hitting my desk faster than they can be answered. At least six separate areas of the school’s campus need to be watered and tended every day. We’ve become responsible for hosting whole events on the school’s calendar. It’s a season of merry excitement—lots of enthusiasm, lots of good intentions, lots of disorder. I’m relying on the students now more than they are relying on me, since there’s now too much for any individual to keep track of.
The school has grown into a hybridized, mutant entity that stitches strange sinews together, a limping beast that’s classical, educational, agricultural, decorative, dirty. It’s a kicked hive of sometimes-conflicting concerns. But it’s also a place where bees wrestle in the scarlet cosmos just outside administrative offices, where swallows snap mosquitos out of the air over the orchard fields, where red-tailed hawks saw the sky over the soccer fields with their jagged hunting cries, and where tenth graders sit in the grass to eat their lunches, surrounded by furtive rabbits and powdery bee balm. Boston Ivy pushes through the cracks of mid-seventies brick, Autumn Joy Sedum teams with wasps, and the compost smokes in the morning cold. There’s no such thing as stasis, in gardens or in schools. These days, we’re simply trying to keep up.
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