Between Seasons

I trudge through lingering snow to where the sun has warmed the soil enough to reveal more white stuff of a different nature. The ephemeral snow drops have opened, covering with little crowns of white a remote hillside at the bottom of our yard, showing off for nobody but me and the two foxes I saw yesterday sniffling through the delicate flowers, checking out, I can only presume, the best place to raise their coming litter. They rolled there, like kittens, their shiny red coats first in the snow piles and then in the flowers before moving off toward what den I hope they’ll choose again - in full view of the house, but safely behind and beneath a fallen tree. It is that time of year - transitions. Days when the sun feels warm and promising, other days when the ice solid in the birdbath offers little promise that spring is on its way.

I love this season between seasons, the occasional chance to get out and feel the sun and weather the mud, to check my new trees and shrubs for buds that promise fruit and flowers and (hopefully) to assure myself new growth has not been eaten by the deer. It is time to order compost and eradicate the weeds that appear before my flowers have come back to life.It is the time when I can take stock of how my garden has evolved, to remember where I moved things, and what more I will manage when spring truly comes along.

This month, too, by coincidence (or maybe not), I am helping with three separate reunions that will happen over the course of spring and summer. Each represents a significant season in my life: my beloved and extraordinary elementary education (60 years), my high school graduation (55 years), and a reunion with my stalwart team of explorers I helped to cross Antarctica (32 years). It is disorienting. Each day moves me back and forth in time, recalling names and places, young friends now old - first loves, bosom buddies, confidants, and forgotten rivals: my rich life divided into seasons. I am looking forward to the events to come, even as I’m overwhelmed. Like my garden, I will notice the changes time has wrought on friends, the world, and me, how different paths and choices took us all to different places.. and for a lovely moment, brought us back again.

Spring Will Come

It is the first snow since we moved here nearly two years ago, and I am enjoying the crackle of the hardened crust beneath the boots I bought last year in hopes that snow would come. It is a damper, stickier, and more fragile variety than the snow I grew accustomed to in my years in Minnesota, but all the more precious for its fragility and short life. It may well be gone tomorrow.

I follow across our yard the deer, fox and rabbit tracks - signs that my closest neighbors explore the winter landscape, too, albeit in the hours before I have left my bed. I wonder if, from the underbrush, they now watch me cross the lane to check the rhododendrons whose optimistic buds have grown ever larger since the fall. The wet ice weighs the bushes down and coats the leaves. But the buds still stand impervious, strong and green, and ready to outlast the snow and lead us into spring.

Forever Beautiful

The last time my mother came to this church alive she was well into dementia and unsure of her surroundings. “Something bad has happened,” she repeated again and again as we laid her brother to rest. “Something terrible.” She looked worried and scared until the tree that sheltered the graves of her father, mother, and grandmother - and now her brother - caught her eye. She opened her arms wide and grinned. “Oh, look at this!” she said as her hands outlined both the tree and the sky beyond. “How beautiful! I could just stay here forever!” We laughed, how could we not? “That’s good Mom,” we assured her, knowing that someday soon enough she would do just that.

I visited, this week, the tranquil graveyard where my mother and then my father are buried. I thanked them again for all they have given me in their lives and, still, beyond to now. And then I turned and thanked the tree whose roots have surely wound around and now hold tight my parents resting still below the surface. Forever. Beautiful.