March 2008

With rushing winds and gloomy skies
The dark and stubborn Winter dies:
Far-off, unseen, Spring faintly cries,
Bidding her earliest child arise; March!
--Bayard Taylor, March

Winter’s giving way, up on the hill. Needing proof, we tramp around the property looking for signs of buds and blossoms. All the snow and rain of the past several months have left the ground beneath our shoes soft and giving where the sun shines, but still anvil-hard and hoary in the shadier parts of the garden. March really is an amalgam of snowflakes and sunshine, bluster and promise, icicle and flower petal. There’s a forsythia on the verge of yellow mayhem, growing from a bank of dirty snow. Dwarf irises, so delicate in bloom, are stalwartly poking up among the frozen remains of last autumn’s sedum and nasturtiums like brave and hardy swords of green. They share space above the old stone wall with several quince, who will offer up peach-colored blossoms in just a few days. We watch their daily progress through the bay window in the living room, or visit them outside when the wind isn’t too fierce, coaxing them on with sweet words of encouragement. Come on, you can do it—prove to us that spring’s arrived!

What ancient and primordial drive pushes us to long so for the spring? Spring, with its myriad chores of pruning and trimming, hauling and mulching, scrubbing and sweeping, doubling the number of items on our weekend To-Do list. In addition to the mundane indoor activities—dusting, laundry, mopping—we delve, elbow-deep, into still-frosty piles of rotting leaves that have overtaken every nook and cranny on the property. We tug at wind-whipped newspaper pages that are impaled on leafless branches. We coerce the dog into twig-gathering forays. All this in addition to, not in place of, the other household duties. Why, oh why, do we long for the spring?

But long we do, and that longing seems to appear earlier and earlier. As soon as the magic of the holidays wears thin, thoughts of sunshine and wisteria start popping up, with the cold and blustery New Year just weeks old. The seed companies exploit our longing by sending glossy pictures of the newest, boldest, hardiest plants that we Simply Must Have! Easy to Grow! Wow your neighbors! the catalogs trumpet. We gobble up the pictures, turning the pages quickly and greedily, anxious to see everything all at once, like starving orphans at some Dickensian banquet. Reaching the end, we start back at the beginning and slowly savor each plant, reading the descriptions aloud to the dog, who—truth be told—doesn’t look impressed. We tell each other, “Here, this one is perfect—it can go next to the front gate!” We start lists and fold down page corners. We (well, me—D isn’t as far gone, yet) draw up revisions of the garden plan to accommodate a bed of horseradish and rhubarb, a ring of Ilex verticillata around the yellow birch, an entire bed devoted solely to hellebores.

The man-hours needed to bring these dreams to fruition are no matter, this March self says; it will be wonderful. Our already over-burdened Summer selves may not agree, but March will brook no resistance. Spring, March announces, has sprung. Luckily, most of March’s dreams dissolve away under April’s sunshine, and the garden catalogs slip, forgotten, down between the cushions of the sofa, dogged-eared pages and all. The chores of spring, however, are a cold, hard reality. The gathering and sorting and disposing of are all part of the rhythm of the season. And after a cold, house-bound winter, we wouldn’t really want it any other way.