Presently

The rhubarb has doubled in size in a week.

The wind has been having a serious conversation with the trees all morning. I pulled my Garden Way cart across the bumpy ground to the huge pile of soil out behind the neighboring barn. On my way back to the garden, I stopped at the mound of composting manure from the chicken houses and added a few shovels. My garden beds are nearly ready for planting. Already the peas are up in one and the seed potatoes are buried in hills in another. Every weekend I haul a little more soil and compost to the remaining beds so I can plant the rest of the vegetables at the end of the month.

Oregano, chives and garlic are growing in the herb garden. Soon it will be warm enough to plant parsley and basil. They will season my breakfast eggs and other dishes all summer long. I cut my first asparagus stalks yesterday and tonight there will be fresh rhubarb sauce for dessert.

I am waiting for June to wash the curtains and the windows and screens. I have outdoor and indoor projects planned but they're all waiting on warmer weather. I want to be able to open the windows when I paint the kitchen cabinets and I need a few consecutive days of nice weather to dig up the patio stones and level the earth beneath.  Over the years the ground has settled. Guests sitting on the far side lean precariously toward the forsythia bushes.

The daffodils have been singing their yellow songs for two weeks now. The lily and phlox stems have pushed up through the cold earth in the patio garden and the rose bushes have sprouted tiny green leaves. Violets and bloodroot blossom side by side. On a few days it's been warm enough to eat out of doors at the patio table or to lounge in my outdoor swing. Today, however, it is overcast and the wind is chilly. The weatherman said we might experience thunderstorms with hail. It put me in mind of a Vermont neighbor who, as we sat huddled on bleachers in our winter coats one June watching our sons play baseball, said, "It's so cold that if it'd rain, it'd hail." Ayup.

Violets and bloodroot are blooming on the back slopes.

All is Well

Rain moving in.

Incongruously, a stark black crow flaps across my line of vision to the drone of a jet hidden above a vast vast army of storm clouds that's muscling its way across the sky. Torpedo shaped, some of them, they swallow the blue in great gulps and devour the whiter, puffier clouds at the horizon. I do not want the rain, not today when the air is at last mild, temperate and balmy and springlike after so many weeks of cold. The lilac bush wants the rain, and the soft green shoots of daffodil and tulip, and the newly upturned garden beds, but not me. I want to be out of doors in the sunshine that smiled down from yesterday's cloudless sky, held in that delicious warmth like water in a simmering kettle, like the roots of a sapling wrapped tightly in burlap to keep them from freezing, like a baby bird nestled in a handful of fluff and feathers and woven grasses.

The rain is not to be a drenching, more a sprinkling, a quick succession of light showers that will water all the green growing things, a sweep of the sky hose, just enough. The sun will reappear, the last of the ice beneath the pile of wood chips wanting spreading will melt, the earth will smell rich and brown when I turn it over with my pitchfork. I will haul load after load of chicken manure-rich dirt to fill the boxes and I will stop often to sip sweet tea and gaze over my small domain, noting with pure pleasure the symmetry and rightness of all I survey.

I will say with Dame Julian of Norwich, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well"

Filling the garden beds.