Hope is a Many Feathered Thing

There is no joy like an April garden. It grows great with optimism, sprouts with hope.

A few weeks ago we uncovered the fledgling mint - its tiny leaves pungent. Shoots of thyme dared poke out of the still cold earth and a brazen arm of lavender raised its greening limb to the sun. (Lavender, my truest plant love, has never survived a winter here. To see it alive and green in late March must be a beckoning to something magical that lies ahead).

These two rounds of June-like weather have deceived both our minds and the plants. The crocuses popped open in one afternoon - not quietly sneaking forth from the last piles of snow - but triumphantly bursting into full sunlight. The daffodils bloomed like an Easter parade just yesterday. But despite all this, I've given very little thought to our garden. Caught up in various dramas, I've made no plans, drawn no garden maps with Alex, perused no seed catalogs, read no gardening books, made no plans at all save asking for a tree blocking the sunlight to be removed.

But this afternoon I talked to a friend, a self proclaimed "avid gardener". It was supposed to be a conversation about resumes, but I could hardly hear over the wind rushing into the cell phone. He was in the garden planting the early spring plants.


"It's time already?" I asked.

"Almost too late," he said.

I should know these things. I planted peas and cabbage and spinach last year. But I am still a novice - and quite easily distracted. And so I let myself be distracted again. Seeing the top of the kitchen counter was not essential - at least not today. The halves of plastic eggs in the middle of the living room floor could stay there another night. I did have seeds and soil and little starting containers. I did have popsicle sticks and a pen. I pulled them all out. Cate and I waited for the bus. She flapped her arms, running up and down the driveway squawking like a bird until she heard the bus rumbling down the road. She then stood next to me, intermittently screaming, "Ally! Ally! and squawking like a bird. Alex emerged with the pleased and amused by his sister face, sprinted across the road and enthusiastically shouted, "Yes!" when asked if he wanted to plant some seeds.

The three of us worked together for the next hour or so, filling the tiny containers, pushing the seeds into the soil, labeling them carefully (an important lesson from last year), watering and finally singing the growing song penned by Alex at age two and sung to every seed ever planed here in Fly Creek. We planted pansies in pots, talked about the spot in the garden we will clear tomorrow and plant peas. And no memory of tomato blight or starving rabbits or waterlogged soil or voracious weeds took root. Only hope.

We finished the planting, placed the boxes in the windows and went to the backyard. Alex - a seasoned veteran on the swing - flew higher and higher into the air, and Cate, for the first time ever, coordinated her legs with her motion, propelling herself further and further off the ground to the great delight of her family. I weeded the herb garden as the swingers swang, the chives already tall and full, the mint beginning its crusade to take over the whole thing, the lavender taller and greener still.

I made dinner while the kids still played - thankful a brief conversation - inadvertently about peas - had set about a perfect afternoon together. Cate and Alex and Steve were back out after dinner, begging for more time and I hated to cut them short for homework and bed, especially on these rare, gorgeous nights before may flies and mosquitos.

I tucked Cate into bed. She begged for a chapter in the Tales Of Winnie the Pooh, a book we have owned for ages, but never read. It was fun to read aloud and she listened and I laughed and marveled as Pooh's head bumped, bumped, bumped down the stairs and he felt quite certain there must be another way - but then again, wasn't quite sure at all there was another way.

And when I came down to the silent kitchen, I heard the peepers for the first time and opened the door as wide as I could to hear them sing.