South-facing glass

Built a cold frame this morning - sash from the old window the storm cracked, boards from the crate the flour came in, angled south against the garden fence. Carpenters have their geometry, and I have mine, which is the geometry of not quite plumb. A slant of an inch too many on the back board. The sun will forgive it; the sun forgives nearly everything if you let it in through glass.

The field behind the house has been quiet since November - that particular quiet, not silence but a held breath, the soil keeping its accounts shut. I set the frame over a row of lettuce seedlings too stubborn to have died, and then I sat on an upturned bucket to watch what the glass would do.

What it did - by noon the inside air had risen eleven degrees above the outside, and the seedlings lifted their heads as though a name had been called. Attention, I thought, is also a cold frame. You cover a thing with your looking and it warms. You take the covering away and the frost comes back by evening, punctual as a creditor. The measuring thermometer read 54 degrees in there while my breath hung white outside the frame - two climates within a hand’s span, divided by a pane the hail already ruined once.

A chickadee landed on the sash and regarded me with the disapproval of the uninvested. Then the wind moved through the bare elms and made that sound the elms make in March - a rushing without leaves, the tree practicing for what it will say later. I stayed until my hands went numb, which took forty minutes, and the whole while the seedlings went on with their small waking as though nothing had been decided, because nothing had.

Slant light is the honest light. The noon kind reports; the four o’clock kind testifies. The frame is built for both, set where the fence shadow lets go of the ground at half past two - which means the season has turned whether the almanac admits it or not.

Weeds in the frame bed: seven. Seedlings that lived: twelve.