Lettuce in Winter

The potting room was a miserable dank
shed, trash-chocked, roofed in plastic, with blackberries
ingrown amid the jetsam. He dragged it all
into the light, sifting for tools or nails, then
consigning the rest to dump runs. With one son,
the quiet one, he re-roofed the room with scraps
from the house roofing, and installed used windows.
On the south, a sliding door turned on its side
served for a greenhouse. A friend's timely offer
of a chimney to salvage solved the question
of how to floor. With his other son, the tall
one, he rented a forty-foot ladder and
picked bricks out of the air, frightened half to death.
They piled them by the plant-room door, and the girl,
last child, brimful of jokes and laughter, brought bricks
one by one, and he cleaned and set them face up
in a herringbone pattern. She swept sand and
mortar into the cracks, and danced in the sun
which already had warmed the red clay. Now for
A bench, painted green, the color of wishing,
and pots of all sizes, flats too, and a tall can
for watering. He hankered for lettuce in
winter, and sowed flats in October. After
a month, the wild geese and their music gone south,
he noted the seedlings were spindly and sad,
so picked up a hammer and some two-by-six,
and built a quick cold frame with the other half
of the always helpful sliding door. Outside
on the south wall in the duck pen he framed it,
and dibbled the seedlings within. They liked that,
but darkness comes on in December; after
a full day, all week, one comes home exhausted
to eat and sleep, not to water a garden.
One thing only has saved the lettuce: the ducks
do not like coming in for the night. He goes
out in the dark to disturb them; they rush home
complaining, as the madman hops and chuckles.
He locks them away from coyotes, and turns,
most briefly, to visit his seedlings. By feel
he gives them their water, and tends them, his hands
stretching toward summer in the unseen leaves.