Spring is the earths fulfillment of the promise to continue. Things that have been hidden, tucked away under not so rich soil, aka dirt, and dead leaves warm, wake, and try to push their way up toward the sun and impossibly blue sky. I feel the daffodil as I lay abed when the sun peeks in, pushing me to get out from under the cozy down alternative and start a new day. I am joyous and hum a senseless ditty as I prep the coffee and plan to take some time to just bask in the sun as I tackle the required cleaning that tandems this miraculous celebration of rebirth.
I’m not much of a gardener these days. I am now what I have coined as an extreme passive gardener or, Gigi the EPG. Gone are the winter days of perusing the seed catalogues and graph paper bed diagrams. I don’t devour the Farmers Almanac and commit it’s weather predictions to memory. This brain doesn’t hold the data like it used to and sadly due, I believe, to climate change the Farmers just can’t call it like they used to.
But still every few days in Spring I wander my yard and see the evidence of my past labors. I watch as the snow on the mountain makes its appearance. I note that perhaps come Fall I should plug a few more bulbs here or there and I should probably figure out when to throw the caladium tubers into a fresh pot of dirt. The snow on the mountain, Euphorbia Marginata, is from my childhood home. My mother got it from my grandmother’s garden and I got it from my mother’s. It continues. The clematis out back is also from my mother’s garden. I hope to be able to transplant it to my daughter’s new home in the fall.
The lilacs are good and leafed out now. There will be blossoms in May. I had an old bush break off a good size chunk in the fall. I watched it get rained and snowed on and in January I dragged it out and chopped it up. I used many of the twigs and branches to fashion my stick sprites (see a future post here) and threw a couple limbs into a snow pile. When the snow pile melted I popped the branches into a small bucket and made sure it would stay good a wet. Note the EPG mode. When the leaves started popping on the mini-trees I informed my two daughter’s that their “trees were ready.” They each got pieces of my garden. It continues.
Needing to get the tree out of the bucket and into the ground at my youngest’s house I tagged her 6 year old to do some heavy lifting. He mostly reveled in the hope of excavating dinosaurs and celebrated with abandon the permission to get his hands dirty. His eyes turned saucer when I told him that some farmers drop their drawers and sit in the dirt to test soil readiness for planting. Sitting in the hole sin pants was just a step too far for the boy. But he too, taking a cue from his Gigi, took some moments to bask in the sun. And it continues. Tomorrow I protest.
swansroost 