Waiting for Spring

The picture is my garden, under about eight feet of snow. Well, six feet anyway. It's hard to imagine there will ever be plants growing there. There are some, waiting, living on my windowsills for now, reaching for the light, dreaming as I do, of warmth and sunshine. It's been a long winter. I think it snowed every day for most of it and has been miserably cold. Of course, everyone says this is very unusual. I've never been anywhere where people said, "Oh, yeah, this is what the weather is usually like this time of year."

The arrival of the seed catalogues in January is always hopeful. One can imagine, once they come, that there will be spring, someday. The pictures are bright, the plants perfect in every way, not a broken leaf, not a bug, no sign of stress or disease. The promise is plain--big, round, red tomatoes, perfect pansies, lilacs from the dead land. The garden in real life never quite lives up to the advance publicity, but what ever does. We live on dreams a lot.

They're promising warmer weather tomorrow. "They", the weather guys on TV, have to be right sometimes, don't they?