First Lettuce Day

 

There's a morning every spring when you walk out and the air has shifted. Not warm exactly — not yet — but softer. The frozen ground has given way to mud, and the mud has given way to soil, and the soil is asking you a question you already know the answer to.

We put the first lettuce in this week.

It's not dramatic work. You kneel, you dig a shallow hole with your fingers, you tuck a seedling in and press the earth around it like you're tucking a child into bed. You move down the row. Your knees get wet. Your back starts talking to you around row three. Somewhere a red-tailed hawk is circling and you forget to look up because you're watching the spacing between plants, making sure each one has room to become itself.

Thirty-five years we've been doing this, and I still can't explain why it moves me — these tiny pale-green starts that spent weeks in the greenhouse

suddenly out in the open air with nothing between them and the sky. It feels like trust. Theirs in us. Ours in the season.

The farm looks bare right now if you don't know what you're looking at. Brown fields. Bare oaks. The house up on the hill watching over everything the way it has since 1909. But look closer and there's green everywhere it matters — in the greenhouse trays, in the rows we just planted, in the garlic pushing up through last fall's mulch. Spring doesn't announce itself here. It whispers first, then gets louder every day until suddenly you're in it up to your elbows and wondering where March went.

I've learned not to rush it. The season sets the pace. We just show up, kneel down, and begin again.