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Commentary
Picking up sticks in troubled times
We had another windstorm the other night. It was bad enough that Bella, the one I call my “deathbed promise dog” (because she was my mother’s rescue and now she’s mine) whined and flung herself against my bedroom door. I woke to a yard that looked like some giant threw a tantrum while playing a game of pick-up sticks.
The next morning, I went out to pick up the tangle of branches and twigs. Well, not all of them. There are always more sticks to pick up. And I’m always glad.
It had been a rough week. President Biden’s State of the Union address was more of a Divided States of Distress howl in the wilderness. There's the tragedy raging in the Middle East. I worry about our daughter and her family in Israel; I’m mourning mounting death and bleak despair in Gaza.
The news makes it difficult to do what we’re all supposed to be doing: Go to work. Do your taxes. Clean your house. Put food on the table. Worry about car repairs and medical bills. This year’s Oscars were too tame to distract much.
The news makes it difficult to do what we’re all supposed to be doing: Go to work. Do your taxes. Clean your house.
Picking up sticks is a great antidote to the news. It’s a meditative activity, easier than knitting because you don’t have to count the stitches. Better than folding laundry because you can’t get as mad at nature as you do at the people in your house who change shirts twice in a day.
As I move around the yard, stooping and bending, I imagine myself as one of those peasants in Jean Francois-Millet’s paintings; I’ve always wanted an apron like the ones the women wear in his portraits. Maybe that explains why I had a sudden fit recently and bought a pair of black denim overalls with front pockets big enough to load up with apples or seashells. Or sticks, even.
I also think of my grandfather while I work. He was Scottish, often wore a flannel shirt with suspenders, and was an avid gardener and stick collector. Pipe clamped between his teeth, every spring he’d stoop and bend through the yard until it looked like a thousand elves had plucked every errant twig off the ground. He was picking up sticks through troubled times as well: the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam. Whatever the world news, his was a lawn he’d be proud to have you see.
What I love is that there’s an organization to my stick collecting that I lack in other areas of my life: I simply start at the front of the house and slowly move around to the back. I gather up the sticks, breaking the long ones in half with a satisfying crack before layering them into the garden wagon.
Our wagon is huge. Really, I should be growing pigs or pumpkins, with a wagon this size, but I can pile a ton of sticks in its giant boot. Or at least that’s what it feels like once I’ve filled the wagon, haul it around the side of the house and muscle the load into the stick pile. Before too long it looks like a bear den, or like one of those exotic twig pagodas in a botanical garden.
Within a couple of hours, my back is crying for mercy. Just one more, I think, and reach for a branch that’s fallen beneath the blue spruce that has grown taller than our house.
That’s when I see it: a cluster of snowdrops, bowing their white heads shyly beneath the fir branches. A stick has fallen on them, too.
Gently, I reach beneath the spruce’s prickly branches and draw the stick away from the snowdrops, releasing them, if only for a moment, from the weight they carry.
