brooding spring

[dragonlady7]

It's a gorgeous day, a moody brooding dark day, wind-swept and dark and muddy. The sky is heavy and dark, the windchimes are yammering, and the earth smells of awakening. It's 60 degrees and Buffalo is almost completely thawed, with only a few filthy icy little heaps of matter that was once snow, mixed with mud by the plow, remaining at the margins of what were once great towering snowdrifts.
The wind is tearing things, destroying things, knocking things over, and revealing things. It's blown away any mulch or leaf-mold that covered any of my flower beds, and exposed the bulbs that are pushing their way up. Our freakishly late winter (our first real hard frost was in January) means that many of these spring-flowering bulbs started to sprout in December, pushing up their new green shoots just in time for the deep-freeze that descended in January, breaking records and freezing the tender shoots right through.
So a lot of the crocuses, hyacinths, and even tulips that started to sprout are sitting there in shock now, no longer tender or green, but rather somewhat withered and a bit brown at the edges. But many of them are still alive, in that wonderful tenacious manner that bulbs tend to be, and trying again to grow. I have a few stunted blooms of crocus now. And my snowdrops have decided that they're alive, and are straggling up along the borders of all my flowerbeds. (I think I just bought like a huge pack of them, so they're kind of everywhere, and I think I didn't plant them thickly enough, so they look a little pathetic. I'll give them a couple years, though, and they'll be respectable. I got so many of them and put them everywhere because this was once a Latvian garden and Latvians love snowdrops, but by the time we moved in, only a few of Aunt Matilda's were left.)

I'd take pictures, but none of what's going on in my yard seems very photogenic. It's all brown grass and puddles of water and the sky is as dark as late evening, with occasional heavy drops of rain striking the winter-grimed surfaces of my windows. The crocuses are yet feeble, the snowdrops brave but sparse, and the sad frostbitten leaves of the hyacinths are an ugly tangle by my kitchen door. But they promise great things. It will be a beautiful spring, in a couple of weeks.

I wish I'd started some seeds. I'll get around to it.
I hope I have time this spring to do some planting. My May vacation happens to perfectly coincide with my cousin Maureen's wedding, and cousin Aleksander's visit from Norway with his girlfriend Jorunn (pushyqueen). So that vacation will be taken up, happily, with driving around NY with some Norwegians-- to my great delight, as the timing was a complete coincidence and in fact I'd chosen that week for my vacation in a vain hope of coinciding with Andreas's ashore time, so I could go to Norway. (It's been nearly a decade since I left with a promise of coming back someday when I was healthier and could appreciate it.)


Oh bliss!! Here comes the rain, making its odd hollow patter on the metal roof of our sunporch. I love the sound of rain on a metal roof-- as a child, my bedroom window opened out onto the tin roof of my parents' sunporch (which is now the room with the woodstove in it, making my formerly-chilly childhood bedroom the new best winter cozy spot in the house), and I spent enough of my nights listening to the rain on that roof patter in its set rhythms (there was a dripping gutter, as well, with a rhythmic thunk). In winter, you could hear the sound change and disappear as the rain froze, then turned to snow. In the spring it would come across in little waves, varying in intensity. Here it comes again!

I'm going to go listen.