For me time in a garden is pure relaxation. I love to inhale the smell of the earth on an early spring morning. To see new shoots poking out of the soil, buds swelling on the trees, cleaning out and organizing the garden shed in anticipation for the year ahead (I know that’s sic) and most of all that first flush of the roses and iris bursting in perfection. I love the first garden chore of cleaning up the soil from the last years debris, to discovering the earth underneath its winter coat is alive and brimming with life. It is all that dreaming of what is to come. It is down right addicting. I have to force myself to clean the house, do the laundry and pay attention to the rest of the world around me, because honestly, my soul is so stirred by this season called spring that I can’t stand to waste it on the mundane. I am starting a brand new garden this year…most likely my last garden. It is the smallest of all the gardens I have grown, but it will have a condensed infusion of the best parts of all my four previous gardens. I hope like my last garden, that this last leg of my life’s journey will also be a condensed infusion of the best; all that has been planned, prepared, sown, weeded, pruned, and harvested by the master gardener in the soil of my heart. I recently stunned myself, when I was putting on makeup the other day with my glasses on so I can actually see what I am putting on. I looked in the mirror and saw my wrinkles then smiled deep down to my toes. I have wrinkles and for the first time they make sense to me. I found out only a few weeks ago that in my fifty- first year I am going to be a first time grandmother. Yeah! Not as many first’s left as there use to be. Those wrinkles now just make me smile. I now feel I have a purpose to wear them proudly and a destiny to make them worthy of my face. The destiny of being a grandmother, it has overwhelmed me with joy. So while I will be digging around in my soil this spring, I will not only be contemplating my brand new garden and its conception and birth, but a much more eternal conception and birth, the one of my future grandchild.

For, lo, the winter is past; The rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; The time of the singing of the birds has come...