Happy March 1st, it snowed today.
Throughout my life growing up in the NW, I remember getting snow on the first day of March. The weatherfolk say: March in like a lion and out like a lamb. So I wasn't surprised to wake up to a full yard, town, beach of snow. Beauty.
Though I wish this would happen in December, but December tends to be wind and wet.
So I spent the morning sledding through my neighbor's yard and admiring the crushed daffodils and tulips in my garden. Actually, my yard looked better covered with snow! Oh, I have a lot to do this summer.
We have a large yard, but don't romanticize that, it just means more work. B.C. (before child), I used to garden with a lantern late into the night, now I most spend summers at the beach while the buttercups invade the daylilies while I'm away. Because of this task, this yard maintenance, this upkeep of trees and hedges, I sometimes dream about condos. I know, it's wrong, but I do. I imagine walking up steps that don't need to have the leaves raked off the them (and if they do, there's a paid person to do it), I imagine locking the door and leaving without guilt that something needs to be done.
It's funny how looking at condos online relieves stress for me. Maybe it's brings about the idea that all this--our lives and our homes--are only temporary. It's a reminder that my worries today will probably not be my worries ten years from now. Of course, mostly, I'm thankful for my yard and garden, even with garden gloves and shovel, chopping down a volunteer butterfly bush or moving the fig tree--yes, this year I need to move the fig tree.
Because this garden with its wild bushes and morning glory wrapping its way up the hedge, this is my world for the next many years and I can fall in love with it for its free apples, cherries, garden of herbs at my doorstep, or I can curse it for its overgrown sensibilities, its devious plan. How can I not love a garden--weedy or not--the autumn sedum grows without me, the Peruvian lilies return year after year. And today, the weather told me to say indoors a little longer, a cold snap, a snowfall, climb into bed and type up a poem.
