growing green goodness

{This post from early March, just now finding its way to the light...}

My garden is calling to me.  

The moist, clean-smelling earth underneath the dead leaves and old, dried-up twigs of last year’s herbs and flowers.  I scrabble and scrooge (I think that‘s from The Wind in the Willows) with my hands under the dead stuff, and I find… green.  Living green leaves.  Mint.  Oregano.  Little chive spikes finding their way up to the light through holes in the detritus, reaching up bravely into the new year.  

I’m almost breathlessly eager as I unearth them.  Say hello.  Tenderly clear away around the base of each chive-clump, each curling tendril of mint.  Snip dead ends with kitchen scissors which I race madly into the house to retrieve from their drawer, and madly out again, not wanting to miss a moment of the green.  

Why is spring so exciting?

All this newness, all this freshness, compels me to be in it, out in it, breathing it in.  

I want it inside me.  

I want new, fresh spring life inside me, with the same vibrant array of possibilities for growth.  

Spring dirt is teeming with life.  It’s like the sleep of winter has held it captive for so many months, and the minute winter’s icy fingers loosen their grip, spring earth breathes a sigh of relief and releases the fragrances it’s been saving up all winter long.  

Aaaaahhhhhh.  You can almost hear the earth sighing.  Spring has come.  I’m alive.  Awake.  Growing.  Ready for seeds, for rain, for warm spring sun.

The sun gently caresses my back with warm hands as I bend over my herb bed, delighted with each new discovery.  I expected everything to be dead when we came back after seven months away.  I even brought back packets of all the same seeds, expecting to replant.  But no, out of five types of herbs, three are living!  And the long thin space for flowers at the front, empty now, I have lavendar goodness to fill it.  A long row of lavendar hedges… 

I ruminate on the front steps, sitting happy in the sun, inhaling the dusty fragrance of my pile of herb fronds.

Imagining growing green goodness.