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Spring mornings are a lot like
Christmas. Each day we get up and go out into the yard or walk along
the creek or visit the horses in the pasture. And each day, each
morning, we find something new the sun has brought us.
Pinfeather leaves of an unbelievable green now start showing on
cottonwoods that have stood like stark ghostly frames all through
the cold winter. Hopeful blades of grass peek through clumps of
brown left over from last summer’s verdant pasture. Everywhere we
look there is something new and different.
A lot of this Christmas-in-spring is kept just among us, because we
might be accused of being ... well ... poetic if we told people why
we were really carrying that coffee cup out into the yard. So we say
lame things like “I think I’ll get some of that fresh air this
morning.” What we really mean, of course, is “I want to see if
Richardson’s bay mare has had that foal yet.”
Some of us have worked very hard last
fall and winter to prepare for this spring. By grafting. OK, we have
a Granny Smith apple tree. Let’s see if we can’t get a branch of
Rome Beauties or Jonagolds to grow on it, too. And we understand
completely that where we live no olive tree can survive the winter.
That isn’t supposed to stop us from trying, is it?
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Nature pitches us a boatload of
challenges each day that we’re alive. This plant needs more water
than falls naturally here. That tree can’t take the temperatures we
get. This little tree needs soil with more organic matter in it.
And those challenges are the stuff winter dreams are made of. We do
the best we can to cure the lack, the freeze, the drought, and then
we wait for April. We wait impatiently until we can come out of the
house some morning and check the grafts on the apple tree and see
tiny green leaves coming on the grafted branch. We search the bare
ground where we planted that new kind of seed that won’t grow here -
to see if it’ll grow here.
It is a continuing feast of green, a triumph of anticipation. An
April morning can make us want to sing.
[Text from file received from
Slim Randles]
Brought to you by
“Dogsled, A True Tale of the North,” now available online as well as
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