Spring Mornings

One of my favorite novels of the last decade or so is Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. Here is a novel full of musky mountain ripeness, laugh aloud observations, and a sensuality that nearly stains your fingers as you turn the pages. I read the book the year it was published, and recall that it perfectly fit my springtime mood of feeling younger than I am, of sensing some liquid filling up in preparation to burst and bloom, and feeling love and connection to every beautiful thing. And in spring, I am convinced most everything is beautiful and so everything can be loved.

This season is for farmers the time of dreaming and seeing what others don't yet. It's a moment of sighing and letting go of the tightness built into our our bodies, a way of holding ourselves that we perfect sometime in mid-December as a protection against the winter cold, and early and late dark and the random sloppiness of the elements surrounding us. Now, in February, or maybe early-March, but as soon as we can, we release and open again to the life within the soil, the power of the golden sun, the miracle of the colors of green and brown and red that thrust upward awake and alive, and to the songs of the birds and the insects and the leaves forming on the trees and bushes as the movement of air sweeps and caresses and moves them softly and wildly.

Springtime, ah. I'm in love and you're beautiful. Aren't you now. Springtime is the promise that life is itself all the wonder we need. It's a promise we can fulfill. Plant something.