Spring: are you out there?

The wind is howling outside my door. Well, actually, it's getting under the aluminum casings of my windows and doors and is performing that annoying whine/whistle that only wind and aluminum can produce. Like Mother Nature joining my house in a kazoo chorus. Appropriately irreverent and ridiculous. The sun is out, the sky is blue, and the cold is penetrating. Spring? Hah!

I'm beginning to think that spring has passed us by. I'm standing at my door, frantically signaling and trying to flag her down as she swings past. My poor pansies, lured into bloom by the one warm afternoon this week, are being battered and blown by a wind more appropriate to January. The gate is rattling in protest, and the buds on my shrubs are as close-mouthed and grimly-tight-visaged  as the Wicked Witch of the West. Just when Glinda should be sailing in with flowers and fairies, we're getting nothing but flying monkeys and wintry glares and brown and blasted gardens. Even Oz was green, but not us. We are, it seems, perpetually Kansas, in stark black and white.

Come, now. Have we not suffered enough this year? Coldest winter, deepest snows, record lows and more. Time to pull out our ruby slippers and click our heels and chant three times: 'There's no time like spring."

Maybe that will get us there. I'm willing to try anything right now.

Not there yet

Easter is creeping up on me. Daylight Savings Time is here (whatever you may think of it) and that means spring is coming, unbelievable as that may be, as the last of the dirty snow piles are still, ever-so-slowly, melting.

It's hard to believe in spring when the garden is still an ugly green-gray/brown, and the remains of last year's leaves dangle dispiritedly from the trees. The plants I didn't cut back in the fall (liriope, day lilies, lavender--there's a complete roll call out there) droop, frostbitten and forlorn in their pots. The cute little rosemary 'trees' I positioned on the front porch after Thanksgiving didn't make it through the last bout of snow and ice, and while I will optimistically cut them back and hope for resurrection...I don't think so. Brown is not the color of faith OR hope.

What I need is one warm day with no agenda (hard to find these days, with all the postponements we endured during this last month) so that I can clean up, clear up, cut up all the debris that seems to be the major crop of my little garden, and start anew. I am determined to do the clean-up first, so that I may see what hardy plants dare to sprout again in my garden of (sometime) neglect before I indulge myself at the local nursery,

With this good intention in mind, I am reminded of a Peanuts cartoon of Lucy writing on a blackboard  over and over again "I will not talk in class" until she reaches the last line of the last frame and writes, "On the other hand, who knows what I'll do?" I will probably buy plants before I finish cleaning up, no matter what I say.  My trip(s) to the nursery are my own little act of faith--faith that spring will come, that the birds will come back, that my precious little fountain will not have  sprung an irreparable leak, that I will be able, again, after  acquiring the requisite pound of dirt under my fingernails (gloves are for sissies), be able to see color and texture and beautiful things growing right here outside my door.

I need some daffodils. I need some green. I need spring. Now.