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| Moss growing in the backyard |
After making peace with our move and with the fact that our house was to be sold, I find myself back in it now for the past three weeks, and making peace all over again. Peace in the fact that it is still ours even though we have moved and it is spring and there are many delightful discoveries to be made by just raking back leaves and removing the grey and faded wispy tendrils of plant debris from the previous year.
The past week the temperatures have danced high and low and the ground is damp and squishy, all reminiscent of early spring in these parts. I have seen daffodils slowly open throughout the day as I moved from one flower bed to the next, startled by their efficacy.
The vegetable garden has been raked and hoed with new compost folded in and the dark earth softly mounded into 3 even rows. The chives were carefully dug up and moved closer to the thyme. An old blueberry bush that never produced after its first year that was more dead than alive was removed all together. Snow peas were sown in neat 6" double rows 2" apart and yesterday I added the tiniest bok choy and brussell sprout plants that I picked up on a trip to a local garden center with my Mother.
The weekend forecast is for rain, rain, and rain....just what all the newly uncovered flowers and freshly planted vegetables need.
I am slowly beginning a new book, 1493, and this morning these words in the introduction vibrated with what I call universal truth, summing up exactly how gardening meets my needs:
"After I planted the seeds from the catalog, it didn't take me long to discover why so many people love puttering in their gardens. Messing around with the tomatoes felt to me like building a fort as a child: I was both creating a refuge from the world and creating a place of my own in that world. Kneeling in the dirt, I was making a small landscape, one that had the comfortable, comforting timelessness evoked by words like home." 1493, Charles C. Mann
