When Spring comes, I always say that it's my favorite season. But, when other seasons make their way across the calendar, I've been known to say the same thing.
I love the weather in Springtime. I don't even mind the rain. The dampness softens the thirsty earth and washes everything that it touches. Everything smells so fresh. When I discover a new green shoot poking through the ground, I find a renewed spirit. There's just something about watching Nature in the warming weather that refreshes me. Seeing the budding trees and the blossoming plants is like watching the world around me awakening for a long, winter's nap.
When I was a teenager, I was living in a small town where nothing really happened until the summer visitors arrived in June. Springtime always signaled the feeling that boredom would soon end. I remember feeling a wanderlust in Spring when I was a bit older. I believe it was just because I was being energized, and didn't know how to channel that into something productive at that time.
Now, in these years of late middle age, when the weather, rather than the calendar, indicates that it's truly Spring, I want to get the shovels, the rakes, the wheelbarrows and get to work in the yard. I don't call it "yardwork." If I did, I'd slack off. I call it 'gardening'. Somehow that term is much more attractive. I like to plant, to 'decorate' the yard with color and shapes and different sizes of plant material. I am a rather haphazard gardener, however. I just plunk things in holes and hope for the best. My garden has been called a 'country' garden by my friend because of the lack of organization in it. I tend to use plants that I like and pray that they will be happy and thrive where I put them. Most of the time it worked in the garden I had in NY. Here in SC, though, I'm having to learn new plants and their habits. The sun is very hot in summer, and we have very little shade. Plants that like full sun are not always lovers of high heat. I'm learning to be more selective when buying plants, choosing hardy varieties and doing my best to see what their best habitat is.
Spring is here now and I'm raring to go. However, my mind is faster than my body is, and it is capable of doing far more than my body can endure in a day. Yesterday's lifting and raking and moving and pre-planting clean-up proved that. My muscles are sore, so today's endeavors will be lighter. That last sentence translates to 'today I'm going to sit on the front porch with my library of gardening magazines and investigate the possibilities'.
