Spring brings hope (03/31/08)

It's spring. The earth is awakening from a long winter's nap. Sometimes it drifts back to sleep and pulls a cover of snow over itself for a few more days before warming up for the season.

I have an overwhelming urge to go outside and clean up the gardens and flowerbeds. Then I step out into the fresh air and realize that it is much too cold and muddy to be messing with dormant flowers.

I have already attacked the mulberries that are determined to take over the back flowerbed. One is way too big for my clippers but the rest of them cringe every time I come near. I think they know I'm going to do my best to rip their branches off. It's good therapy when I'm feeling cranky.

I read somewhere that gardeners are very destructive people. Whoever wrote that is correct. I have spent many a summer day happily murdering sunny yellow plants that insist on growing in the sidewalk cracks. Thistles cause a dilemma; they are pretty when they bloom but ever so vicious when stepped on.

I yank them out by the roots. This seems to cause them to multiply and applying the popular herbicide that everybody tells me to use only serves to invigorate them.

A few days have been nice enough to take stock of the yard and begin a shopping list for the garden center. Even though gardeners are destructive, gardeners always have hope.

This will be the year that there will be something in bloom from spring till frost. This will be the year that the vegetables will ripen early and will be harvested before the rabbits and insects do their inevitable damage. This will be the year that we plant a vegetable that we have never seen before and it won't take over the entire lawn.

This will be the year that things will be different.

It sounds suspiciously like the resolutions that we make on New Year's Day. Unfortunately there is about the same chance for the garden to look like the ones in magazines that there is for me to look like a magazine model.

Wait, I already look like a magazine model. I just wish it wasn't the "before" picture!

Gardens and people are never finished. The "after" picture is always changing. Just when we think we are almost at the goal somebody moves the goalposts.

So we poke and trim and fuss with our gardens and our lives in hopes of one day finding perfection. We try all the latest products and sample the latest fads. And still the wind and rain crush our plants and toxic people crush our souls.

Just when we are ready to pave the garden and paint the flowers on it we are blessed with a butterfly that alights on a perfect blossom and stays there long enough to be captured on film. The sweet smell of lilacs caresses our souls and takes us back to happy times. They are all the sweeter because they are so transient and ethereal.

Just when we are ready to give it up and crawl back into bed and hide until things get better someone brings in a baby and we touch its silky hair and are reminded of all the babies in our own family like baby Emma who knows how to sing, "Tinkle, tinkle little star . . ." and no that is not a misprint. We are reminded of once-tiny babies who are now playing football and going to dances. And we are reminded of tiny babies who now top 240 pounds at only 10 years of age.

Things change; sometimes for the better and sometimes not. And lurking in the background of our lives is happiness. Lurking in the background of our gardens is beauty.

All we have to do is look for it and accept it for what it is. As Robert Frost once wrote, "Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length." It may not last long but it is glorious when it happens.

We don't realize it but we achieve perfection every day just by being who we are. We are as unique as the flowers in our gardens and as contrary as the weeds we pull.

Just wait, this year will be different. This year flowers will fill the garden from spring until frost and maybe I'll finally get rid of the mulberries. Then again, maybe not.

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