Today, at last, the snow melted enough for me to check how things were doing. The tulip greens were up a couple of inches, the daffodils barely poking, not even the crocuses showing any color yet. I looked for the Lenten Rose, finally exposed to the light just hours before.
It was tiny and crumpled and distressed.
In my husband’s rubber boots, I walk through the crunchy-wet snow to check how things are growing. Brave and hardy, new-sprung leaves are poking through the ice. I always worry about them, and wish I could tuck them up warm. They need another mama while the earth pulls her nasty pranks on them and leaves them to shiver.
Held in warmth and darkness, the embryos await the light Grow whole and plump out of the broken Push their rumpled heads out of the night The babies tremble in the springtime wind Their tender jade hands patting at the raindrops, their bodies Stretching slowly toward the sun The children dance in line […]
If you thought that story was odd, here’s another even less explicable. Confession: Once upon a time, I noticed a beautiful plant in a loosely monitored location. It may or may not have been the windowsill of my grandpa’s nursing home. Okay, it was. I made sure the plant was hearty enough to withstand a little […]
Confession: I always thought the true colors of spring were rainbow pastels – lilac, mint, pink, baby blue, soft yellow. But when I went driving a week or two ago and really looked at the countryside, the colors weren’t what I expected. Rust was a big one, and chartreuse, scattered through the trees all over […]
My dad grew edamame before it was cool. We called it by another name back then. In the garden he claimed from a Minnesota meadow, he planted rows of soybeans, poor man’s food he remembered from his boyhood. When the plants died in the late summer, he uprooted them by the dozen and laid them […]