Waking the Garden, Part I

Spring comes suddenly some years in the midwest. One moment the snow is blanketing the landscape, the next, wee green sprouts are sticking up through the chilled earth. It seems you need only a jacket to ward off the morning chill, and the evening air is moist with fog and promise. Other years it comes on softly...misty mornings yield to silver sunshine, and the mountains of snow that were the winter playground of my children shrink, gray and dirty. Each day the fort slumps smaller, and snowmen lose their arms and noses and begin to look like victims of a sunshiny homocide. I can’t say one way is better than the other, but when my children lay claim to discoveries around the yard, I know it is time to wake the garden. Jacob is usually the first to notice changes in the flower beds. He, more than anyone else in our family, embraces the yard through all of its seasons. Retrieving a ball from the slushy snow, he bends down to discover crocus. “Mom! You will not BELEEEEVE it! There are PURPLE FLOWERS in the SNOW!” Collecting nearly black, wet sticks from the ice storm in late winter, he finds a brave, if not foolish, tulip poking its tiny crown-like spire above the mulch. “MAAAAMAAAA! I found something GREEEEEEN!” The strawberry plants, he swears, were green all winter, “sleeping under the blankets” of snow and leaves moldered tan and black. When last year’s twig row markers are bare, and the skins of last season’s last tomatoes are unearthed, it is time to wake the garden...