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.

Signs and Portents

If you look out the window with winter eyes you'll see snow that's still over a foot deep in places. Dozens of small birds huddle about the feeder and the sky above the horizon is the color of ice. But if you go out of doors at noon and listen, you can hear sounds of spring. The sunshine is melting the snow on the roof and the ice on the pond.

Spring is the sound of running water.

Squirrels are frenzied at this time of year. They chase each other up and down trees, sprinting after one another across the frozen yard. Birds are tentatively singing tunes rather than merely calling out. Squirrel chatter and bird song are signs of spring.

Before the cold forced them into dormancy, trees and bushes set next year's buds. Now the sun cradles them in warm hands, setting their quiet inner fire aglow. The sap is rising in the trees, too - around every trunk and sapling and bush is a ring of visible earth where the heat of renewed life has melted the snow.

Even the smallest withes generate heat.

Winter may still snarl and bare its teeth but it is being forced to retreat. Though pussy willows are not yet in evidence nor will there be snowdrops or crocus for some time, a month from now we will see the ground again; two months and the grass will be green. Winter eyes won't serve you much longer.

Waiting lilac buds.

Inevitability

Ducks returning to the pond

March is the month

of smoke and mirrors,

all those grey skies,

those dancing flakes on

violent winds,

pond middles still iced in.

But oh, don’t be deceived.

There is light in the sky until

evening now, and warmth

in the noontime sun.

Spring’s magic hat spills birds

into the morning and they sing

of April.

Share

Today's prompt: Write an Event Instruction Zen Poem 

Stop by the flowers.

Feast your eyes on the colors;

Leave without picking.

Ha!

Today's prompt: The 16 Word Stanza Exercise

Three five-line stanzas—each stanza only sixteen words. What can you stuff

into this simple form?

Sunrise brings the 

wind that slept

in the night,

blanketed in moonlight,

pillowed on bright stars.

Wind wakes fully.

no shilly-shallying.

It bends the tall grasses

and waltzes with the

forsythia.

Left on the clothesline

overnight, a lone shirt

hugs itself, its

sleeves wrapped

against the chill.

Seeking Signs of Spring

I joined my naturalist friend at Bartholomew's Cobble (a cobbled mass of boulders, ledges, old growth trees and a meandering river) this week to see the first hepatica in bloom. We have often sponsored walk/writes where like minded people join us for a relatively silent walk through the woods followed by an hour or so of writing and sharing. This day it was just the two of us, our cameras and our notebooks. Here's what came of it all:

Pink, blue, purple or white petals spring from a nest of leathery, three-lobed leaves. The hepatica is a member of the buttercup family and is one of the first flowers to bloom at the Cobble.

Hepatica at the Cobble

The merest hint

of spring brings them out

like small children bursting

from a winter-weary house.

Out of the dark into the light

wearing only leaf scraps

of clothing and flower petals 

round their heads,

they clamber over rocks

and peer down the wooded hillsides

to the wandering river

or lean back to stare, yellow-eyed

at the blue bowl of sky.

How such a small, green, growing thing

can move the weighted earth,

how blooms so delicate, so barely visible,

can reach and swell the human heart

is on of the world's

finest miracles.

Hepatica's eye-view of the river from it's home ledge.

In Praise of May

Green spreads around me in rippling waves. The trees are fully leafed, singing emerald songs to the sky-blue sky. The morning air has warmed under the bountiful hand of the sun until by late afternoon it shimmers. I tie the sleeves of my sweater around my waist and set off across the fields. Violets are suddenly thick underfoot and I kneel to drink in their sweet scent. The fragrance reminds me of home and my mother’s garden where every spring the violets and lily of the valley bloomed among the burgeoning stems and stalks of day lily, peony, and phlox. 

I strip off my shoes, and socks and wiggle my bare toes in the meadow grass. There is no one to see me and so I throw my arms wide and twirl until I am dizzy—earth and sky and earth and sky and earth and sky—before I must stop or fall.

I stretch out in the soft, still-new grass and think that green smells like fresh air and sunshine and newly growing things. I look up into the sky and let my eyes look beyond the blue, beyond the known, into the vast emptiness that is not really empty but inhabited by the unknown, and I fall in love with it all—the sky, the earth, the fields, the woods, the flowers—just the way I did when I first discovered the world as a small child.

Day's End

I am wakened every morning by bird song and in the evening, the sun is sung down by the robins and the blackbirds, the finches and the orioles, the doves and the warblers. Deep in the woods the vireo calls good night, good night and if you're lucky, you'll hear the whip-poor-will sing.

You might catch a flash of blue as a jay wings its way home or see the swallows flash their feathers over the pond water in the waning light. The sun sets slowly through the clouds, turning them pink and then mauve. They float along the horizon like galleons in full sail, headed for tomorrow.





bottom photo: my yard at sunset

oriole photo credit: www.kiwifoto.com