Yes, Friends, It’s Finally Spring

Kate Flora: How do I know it’s spring? Maybe because I’ve spend the past week on my hands and knees in the garden, digging out the persistent gout weed? Maybe because my back aches and the knees of all my pants are muddy from kneeling the dirt? Maybe because every day the forsythia grows deeper yellow and now the weeping cherry is turning bridal white? Maybe because despite wearing my tick pants, tick shirt, and tick socks, last night while I was reading one of the little buggers crawled down my face?

I like spring. Fall used to be my favorite season but now all that graying and browning and death and decay feel a little too close. Passing the three-quarter century mark is a little daunting.

In order to get the gardens in shape, I’ve pressed the hold button on the next Thea. I feel guilty when I leave my desk to go into the garden, but in truth, spring is short, and there are chores that must be done now, while writing can be done in a few weeks, or after dark. If I don’t stay on top of those weeds, my garden won’t be a garden, it will be a well-fertilized and watered patch of weeds. I stop to ponder whether, give their resilience and determination, I ought to wish to be more like a weed?

One thing I especially love about spring is the wide array of greens that are appearing. Every shade of green from the lightest yellow to the deepest forest, and everything in between. Spring colors change every day, as does the emerging plant life. That patch of empty ground in the garden where I was thinking I might transplant a spirea today sports teeny little spikes of green. Even though there is much to be done, I give myself a time to wander, bending down to peer at what is emerging, frequently trying to remember what I planted last year. If it went into the border a full-grown plant, I don’t know what its infant form looks like.

The aging brain makes this trickier. A friend strolling with me will ask, “What’s that plant?” Something I know very well, but the name won’t float into the screen on the magic 8 ball that is now my brain. I am likely to say, “Give me a few minutes and I’ll remember,” and hope I do. How useful is it to wake up at three a.m. and mutter, “Amsonia?”

I’ve blogged about how gardening is like writing, but right now, I am setting that aside (although I am hoping that the next steps in the Thea book will magically appear. There’s something about a conflict and something about a closet) and trying to simply be present. Crouching over the perennial bed, I am asking, “What came back and what didn’t winter over? What is simply slower to emerge and I must give it time?” Despite being frustrated by the gout weed (Bishop’s weed) and the too aggressive evening primrose, getting down close to the soil, surrounded by bird call, reminds me that I am in my happy place. Yeah, I’m a cynic and a grouch. I don’t much hold with happy places and gratitude diaries. But spring likes to kick me out of my grumpiness.

It’s hard to be grumpy when staring at teeny blue flowers or the vibrant yellow of mini daffodils or the pinks and purples of corydalis or spring anemones or the shiny, bulbous purple of emerging ligularia. Hard not to smile when a bulb that the squirrels have moved blooms in the middle of the lawn, or a volunteer of a favorite plant appears in an unexpected place. Hard not to stand beside the glowing yellow of forsythia shifting in a spring breeze and not feel elated.

So yes. Spring is short and right now, I am out in the garden. I wonder sometimes whether my characters, shut up in the computer’s memory, are starting to feel rebellious. I’ve been writing long enough to think that they do and that they will soon assert themselves and demand their right to my attention. For although a writer can escape to the garden, that escape will never be for long. We are writers because we can’t help telling stories. Because we can’t leave the wondering, and the ‘what ifs?’ behind. So maybe, while I putter in the dirt, they are doing some plotting of their own, and soon, when I am lured back to the keyboard, things will be emerging there as well.