March 30, 2008

Petunia Meditation

Tenacious petunia

Sprouts all winter despite frost

My windowsill spring

It’s snowing again. And again I sit and study the birch trees outside my window, hoping for signs of spring. They are utterly barren, the papery bark peeling in swathes, the spindlier branches snapped by the wind. The gardening books tell me not to prune birches in spring but I will need greater local knowledge than that to care for these trees. It is March 30 and 27 degrees.

A petunia on my windowsill has burst out with two modest, purple blooms. Of course it is indoors with me, not out there with the birches. I fixate on that scraggly flower and feel as though it’s spunk could bring back the sun, warm the walls, melt the ice hanging from the outer sills. Then the sudden thought that it might stop blooming becomes unbearable. Such is the extremely brittle nature of hope and fatalism that take hold when spring is late.

I put on my heavy boots and stomp outside to kick some snow around. Kicking is more cathartic than shoveling at this point and I need the exercise. After I wear myself out and stop to look and listen I notice the tip of my garden fence just peaking above the snow bank and I realize I can hear a mourning dove cooing from a neighbor’s roof. This is spring, just an unfamiliar spring.

The anticlimactic, dragging-it’s-heels-out-the-door sort of winter we’re having couldn’t care less how many layers of thought and feeling and meaning I imbue it with. The snow will drip away at its own pace, my boots be-damned. The mourning doves are back, my petunia is blooming, nature is not about us, and that’s a comfort.