Thursday, April 5, 2012

The Promise

We have lived through March. I thought it would never end. It was the wildest and wooliest March ever. Came in like a lamb with over a week of temperatures in the high 80's, and left like a lion with frost/freeze warnings every other night. It was crazy.

Because of the warm temperatures, the flora and fauna of the world came alive much earlier than normal. The apple tree on the west side of the house that we freed from a vice grip of fox grape vines, burst into bud. The daylilies rose 10" out of the ground. My bonsai Hawthorn tree, a gift from a friend, leafed out, and most of the bulbs I planted last fall bloomed. Actually bloomed. In March. Amazing. We planted peas, spinach and lettuce. We pulled back the straw blanket from the strawberries and they reached for the sun. Already waist-high, the raspberries leafed out and suckers appeared everywhere.

We had to mow the lawn! In March! This is unheard of in Michigan and it will make a very long, lawn-mowing season for us. While mowing out back, I scared a small garter snake and apparently those girlish things never go away because I screamed as it (quite reasonably) fled from the tractor-mower I was riding on. The next day I was sitting in the sun and Don came out to see me. I stood up and started to walk toward him. "Honey, just stay where you are," he said in the tone of voice that only the Snake-Fearing among us understand. Another garter snake. It is spring, after all, when a young snake's fancy turns to...girl snakes, I guess.  "Could you just kill it?" I asked. (And I understand that this is NOT the politically correct thing to do.) He didn't. Said he'd catch the next one and show it out to the large rock and brush pile in the woods. Well, okay. I guess.

But here's the great news. Look what arrived this morning.

Our box of garlic, potatoes, onions, asparagus roots, rhubarb, and one tiny lilac bush. All things that will have to wait 48 hours because we're supposed to have a hard freeze tonight and tomorrow night.

But it's a promise of vegetables to come. Braids of garlic hanging in the garage. Bins of potatoes resting quietly in the dark. Beautiful, enormous pale golden onions drying outside on top of the trampoline. Ruby red rhubarb pie. It's a promise of hard work, weeding and watching for horn worms. Garden bounty. And some day, in a couple of years, fragrant dark purple lilacs.

The asparagus will take 3 years before we can harvest any of it. Knowing this, you're thinking, why didn't we put it in last year? Well, because we didn't. We had trees to plant, raspberry trellises to build, grapes to stake, and an enormous deer fence to put up. So this year we are putting in rhubarb and asparagus.

Today it's cold and windy, though, so I'm sitting inside writing and dreaming of the promise of what's to come.

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