May 13, 2022

Before the Beginning

My favourite time is before anything happens, when it’s all just possibility, because possibility is something that you might even imagine you can hold in your hands, unlike everything that happens after that. (The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…) My favourite weekend day of Thursday, and my favourite month is April, even though April is horrible (which we managed to escape this year with a week in England and getting Covid after that…), because when it’s April it means you’ve still got May and June before you, which means you’ve still got all of summer. The moment before it all gets started, that upstoppable motion, when the green shoots exploding, go, go, go. And forsythia turns into lilacs turns into cosmos, and weeds start growing up from the cracks in the sidewalks, and it seems impossible that my garden was ever just an assemblage of buckets of dirt. Which it was until last Sunday, when I sowed a whole bunch of flower seeds in the pots all up the stairs, though I can no longer remember into which pot went what, but we’ll find out soon enough. Seedlings arriving yesterday from one of my kids’ school fundraisers—we’ve got lettuce, and basil, two strawberry plants, a sunflower. My one perennial that survived the winter throwing up a bit of green, and it’s all starting to happen, but yes, I love it most (because I love it all) just before anything does.