When the world turns green, the gardener’s heart starts thumping.
Spring comes on, banging against the steps and pounding on the door: “get out and plant something,” it says.
As the spring sun slides in through the crack in the curtains and the birds wake up to Aeolus’s warm breath, guilt comes sweeping across the rug, under the sheets and up into the brain.
“Get up, Your Laziness,” it mocks. “It’s the greening of the world and you’re missing it.”
Padding to the kitchen and then to the backyard. Smell the grass, taste the coffee. Robins instead of towhees hop through the garden, searching for worms and grasshoppers instead of seeds hidden in the snow.
No writing today…just tasting, smelling, feeling. It seems a long time since the sterility of the snow stifled sound and smell, but it has only been a few weeks.
Daffodils poking up through the ground. Sweet hyacinth.
Little buds on the chokecherry and lilacs and green poking from the feet of the coneflowers and coreopsis. Good things now. Good things to come.
Barefeet on a warming slab of pink sandstone, toes hanging over the edge tickled by a sprig of thyme growing in the space.
Enormous desire to feel dirt under the fingernails and hands in the soft earth.
