Yesterday, during the 1 hour of sunshine Mother Nature decided to allot for my use, I did a little clean up in the garden. This part of my hyacinth had bent over to touch the ground so I decided it needed to be in a little McCoy vase in the house. What an amazing scent hyacinths have. During the rain that descended later in the day and continues today, I have often stopped to breathe in that perfume.
What a frustrating spring that has been! Day after day of unseasonably cold, rainy weather. Only a few days of sunshine, and never two days in row. Nothing is blooming yet, save for the daffodils and forsythia, even at the end of April. When I decided to take the coaching job in Wisconsin, I was cheered by the fact that I wouldn’t be leaving quite as early as I had to when I was working in San Diego. I was sure I would get to see more of the garden in bloom. No such luck. In fact, there is much less in bloom than there was right before I left for San Diego last year. A quick look back in my blog archives shows me that.
This is our weather forecast for the next 5 days:
I have to mulch, pot more flowers, plant the window boxes. Oh, and I have to pack, organize everything here before I go, write lists for Don. I don’t feel motivated to do any of it, partly due to a reluctance to face the fact that I have to leave for 7 weeks and partly due to this unending dismal weather. Winter was terrible this year. Spring, so far, has been an extension of those gray winter days. I was counting on this time not only to work in the garden but to be in the garden. Being in the garden, working there, takes me to another place. I lose all sense of time. For a little while, my worries fade away as I work with the soil. And there are many worries at present. So I look forward to this particular form of meditation all winter. I feel a bit cheated this year.
I’ve been reading the journals of poet and writer May Sarton. She moved to Vermont in the early 1960’s and writes about her solitary life as a writer as well as the joys of gardening. From one of her journals, Plant Dreaming Deep, she writes:
It seizes a person whole and once it has done so,
he will have to accept that his life is going to be radically changed.
There are seasons when he will hesitate to travel, and if he does travel, his mind will be distracted by the thousand and one children he has left behind, children who are always in peril of one sort or another….whatever he has considered to be his profession has become an avocation. His vocation is his garden.”
