The groundhog sleeps through it all. When she gets going in late March, she’ll feel the same, and I will feel different. The month the groundhog wakes up, Sarah’s book tour will be canceled. Our kids’ schools will close. We will be separated from friends and family for what, at first, we think might be four weeks, or even eight.

I will suddenly become far more interested in the garden than I’ve ever been, and that spring I will learn of a solution to the great groundhog war from watching, of all things, a YouTube video. It turns out that I am not the only person to be locked in conflict with a groundhog, and another gardener suggests a radical solution that works perfectly. I till a patch of soil by the shed, and when I am done planting soybean seeds in my garden, I plant some in the groundhog’s garden. The same with the peppers and the beans.

Beginning that March, I will be outside all the time, every day, ravenous for the normalcy that I can only feel outdoors, where nature proceeds apace. I will begin to understand for the first time in my life that I am not just made for Earth, but also of it.

But we are not there yet. The menacing Spring has not yet sprouted. I dump the dead plants into a compost pile, and return the wheelbarrow to the shed. That night, Sarah and I will listen to the poet Paige Lewis read. I love Lewis’s book Space Struck for many reasons, but especially because the poems give voice and form to the anxiety that dominates so much of my life, the panic of threatening clouds and scornful groundhogs. In one poem, Lewis writes of a narrator who feels

as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss

out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the hole. I’m

the vice president of panic, and the president is

missing.

In March of 1965, the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited the Mir space capsule and became the first human being to float freely* in space. At the end of this first spacewalk, Leonov discovered that his space suit had expanded in the vacuum of space, and he could not squeeze back into the capsule. His only choice was to open a valve in the space suit and let the air within seep into space, which shrank the suit enough that he could squeeze back into his spaceship just before his oxygen ran out. Nature is indifferent to us, but surely it did not feel that way to Alexei Leonov as he felt the air leak out and the void rush in.

I don’t believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go. This mountain will mean God, and that precipitation will mean trouble. The vacuum of space will mean emptiness, and the groundhog will mean nature’s scorn for human absurdity. We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn’t a choice, the kind of meaning can be.