There’s a crisp and alive feeling in the air. It started with the woodpecker outside my bedroom window a few days ago. I was jolted awake with a confusion of feelings that can only be associated with a woodpeckers intrusion at that godforsaken early hour. The oddly electrical drilling noise sounds like someone is accidentally carpentering in your bedroom — that is until you hear the woodpecker’s distinct call. This is followed by an immediate welcome relief to hear a bird again after the dead quiet of the winter months. And then reality strikes and I am filled with a genuine indignation at the indignity of being woken by a bird.. followed eventually by frustration that any subsequent attempts to lull myself back to sleep are futile.
I go about the rest of my day grouchy and sore at the woodpecker, who is not evolutionarily advanced enough to realize that his tree has been replaced by my humble abode. And so it is, with my rekindled love-hate relationship for the woodpecker that I welcome spring each year. Making promises to my garden, fertilizing the azalea and rhodie bushes, starting off cleaning projects in the yard in the small window of opportunity between the frost melting off and the weeds showing up to ruin whatever grand plans I had concocted of a pristine garden.
This year, the muscari and tulip shoots are pushing up from the soil. My success with our fall bulb planting are boosting my confidence for a vegetable garden this summer. Or maybe I should hold my breath for a few weeks until I am able to see and touch the flowers.. to believe that they really exist.
At what point does this change of season occur? Is it during an instant, a day, a week? Is it the first morning that I hear the woodpecker outside my window? If I listened closely enough, would I have detected life in winter? Were the bulbs that I planted last fall not alive? At what point does matter really turn into life? And so I ponder these and other deeper questions about my life, while trying to shake myself out of this cold dark spell and facing the future one morning at a time.
thoughtful, arent you?
especially at late hours when sleep is hard to come by!