Hope springs

Originally Posted on iWeb
Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Today I saw a daffodil bravely poking out of the cold soil. Last summer I transplanted a hundred of them from the front of the house. The new porch needed a new planting plan, so I dug huge holes and sifted the bulbs from the soil. I tucked them into the beds in the backyard. The little kids next door where enthralled with my days of labor. They promised to come back to see them blooming. We were full of hope.

Now, the bulbs I transplanted are the first ones coming up. Will they keep growing? Will they survive to bloom? There are no guarantees in the garden.
But I will keep hoping, keep waiting.

I have been taking the Master Gardener Class since January. Tomorrow is the 11th of 12 weekly classes. Deep in January, I remember thinking how glorious Spring would be by the time I was finishing class. By now the beds would be groomed, I would have planted the early crops. I’d be watching the pea shoots emerging. I was being overly optimistic.

March is almost done, of course I am behind schedule. The raised beds are still snow covered and too wet to dig. I can’t plant seed for peas and spinach in the mud.

Am I being delusional? Has our historically early Easter, the earliest one in our lifetimes, tricked me and filled me with false expectations? Mother Nature has been not been kind, teasing me with afternoons of warm sunshine and then dosing out one chill pill after another.

Will the snow ever go away? I am ready, willing and able to put my book learnin’ to good use. I wonder if I will ever be able to get my hands in the soil.

-- David

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

-Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733