Ammi Midstokke: Secrets to staying as resilient as radishes

Winter does the same thing every year. Arriving after the leaves have laid an invitational carpet and the sun has abandoned us for the southern hemisphere, it settles over the land in whichever fashion suits its mood of the moment. This year appears to be one of shallow skirts of snow, crisp blue skies, and the kind of cold that turns eyelashes frosty.

It doesn’t seem to care what we want or hope for, how much snow the mountains need, or what the meteorologists have forecast. It is impervious to my ski-waxing rituals and my love of snow-laced pine boughs or my need for permission to be as still as the hibernating things.

Just when I accept that I’ll be running on bare trails all winter, it drops a few inches of snow then rains and turns everything into ice chunks. The skiers get a dusting on the mountains so they can scrape it over the ice for a few more weeks. I rebel by wearing canvas sneakers, only to discover we have slush in the streets. Around then, my desperate-and-reliable winter self-care plan begins.

First, I sign up for a race I have no business doing (this year, Sun Mountain in the Methow Valley) because it forces me to risk a chipped ankle or kneecap regardless of winter running conditions. Training through the winter is primarily useful due to the relief from suffering sometime around April or May, which offer a few pleasant runs before the brutality of summer.

Against the advice of most health care professionals, I strip and lie naked and baking like a hot dog in an ultraviolet bun. The scent of coconut and carcinogens wafts through the air even as I am sure I can hear my vitamin D count clicking upward by the minute. Some days I even remember to take vitamin D.

Then I start thinking about what it might be like to feel the warmth of the actual sun and I flip through my mental rolodex considering friends, family and even vague acquaintances who live in places where the temperature does not require wool underwear. Recently, some friends of mine decided to retire in Hawaii and I could not hide my excitement. For them, of course.

Needless to say, I’m heading to Maui in a few weeks to help install a wood floor. I might have oversold my carpentry skills, but it’s a long flight and I plan on watching all the necessary YouTube videos on the way. Next year, I’ll do some research on which tropical countries are in need of harvest support in February.

For the first time in several years, I have one of the most powerful weapons against winter blues – garden planning. The short-sightedness of that does not escape me. I am familiar with the reality that garden planning results in harvest blues, or rather, autumn blues since I rarely have anything to harvest. But this year, like every year, is going to be different.

In the two years we’ve been working on this new land, I have never heard a ground squirrel. This improves my optimism by at least 40%. My new raised beds and fencing will raise it another 40%. The drip system my husband will install will raise it another 25% and that means we’re more than 100% optimistic with a reliability rate of about 0.002%

If one does the math on that, which I do not recommend, it calculates to purchasing approximately 7,000 heirloom, organic, Northwest climate-adapted seeds. This will yield four tomatoes, one moldy zucchini and enough radishes to make you sick of them.

That’s why the most important part of this process is the catalogue perusing because it’s the only time I see the fruiting vegetable or blossoming leaf in its true or recognizable form. It’s where the dream of potential has not yet been sullied. The anticipation of it keeps me going through March, when the days grow longer and it’s time for me to set out my benches for seed starts.

Right about the time I kill all of those, the farmer’s market opens to restore my hope.

There’s something grounding in the predictable rhythms of the year and its expected highs and lows. If I am learning anything at all, it’s to accept them as a reality of life instead of trying to find loopholes and workarounds. Maybe it’s OK if I drag a bit in the winter and my garden feeds primarily wildlife. And, just the same, maybe it’s OK that every year I think it will be better. My optimism is as resilient as the radishes.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com