Risa Bear’s “Lettuce in Winter” opens in a ruined potting shed—a dank, trash-choked space with a plastic roof and blackberries tangled through the mess. From that wreckage, a woman and her children salvage windows, bricks, a sliding door, and even a chimney, piecing together a room for growing things. The poem’s central concern is not simply gardening but the stubborn work of making life possible in unpromising places: clearing decay, repurposing scraps, planting in October, and finally reaching through December darkness to keep a small crop alive. The lettuce becomes a fragile stand-in for hope itself, tended not by grand gestures but by routine, accident, and touch.
The construction mirrors this labor. Free verse line breaks often cut across grammatical units, as when the woman drags the junk “all into / the light” or when bricks are picked “from the air, frightened at every ragged breath.” These breaks keep the reader moving from task to task, while the sentence sounds remain plain and close to speech. Words like “bedlam,” “scraps,” “flat,” “dibbled,” and “herringbone” root the poem in physical work. There is no fixed meter; the rhythm swells and calms according to the scene. The first stanza gathers momentum through hauling and building and ends in a small communal release: “They swept sand and mortar / into the cracks, and danced in the sunbeams then.” That final “then” lands as earned joy.
Imagery moves between ruin and renewal. The opening is all obstruction—dank air, trash, ingrown blackberries—but the family keeps pulling usable material into daylight. Salvaged windows tuck into odd openings; a sliding door turned on its side becomes greenhouse glass; a salvaged chimney answers “the question of how / to floor.” The children are described through small roles and gestures rather than full portraits: the quiet son helps roof, the tall son steadies the ladder, the daughter carries bricks “brimful of jokes and laughter.” Even fixing bricks “face up / in a herringbone pattern” suggests care and intention, turning salvage into design. The bench is painted green, explicitly “for the color / of wishing,” so the building itself becomes an act of hope.
The second stanza shifts into a darker, quieter register. October sowing gives way to “seedlings spindly and sad,” and the geese that once filled the air with “musical throats” have gone south. The cold frame, built from the other half of the same sliding door, offers protection, but the real threat is human exhaustion: after long December days, “one comes home exhausted, to eat, / to sleep, not to water gardens.” Here the poem honestly names what defeats careful plans—weariness, darkness, the body’s limits. The lettuce survives because the ducks refuse to come in at night. That small nuisance pulls the woman outside after dark; she locks them away from coyotes, then turns “as in afterthought” to the seedlings. That word matters: care is not always heroic or scheduled; sometimes it attaches to an irritation, a chore, a half-remembered task.
The ending is both funny and tender. The woman, called “the madwoman,” hops and chuckles in the dark while the ducks complain. Yet her hands find the seedlings by feel and give them water. The final image—“her hands / stretching toward summer in unseen leaves”—draws together touch, faith, and futurity. She cannot see the leaves or the summer they promise; she can only reach toward them. The poem treats ordinary, repetitive acts—clearing trash, salvaging windows, watering by feel—as a quiet form of defiance against decay and dark. “Lettuce in Winter” does not promise that the crop will flourish or that the work will be noticed. It insists only that tending matters, even when done in the dark, with cold hands and a half-amused stubbornness.