O Sun! I thought we'd never see you again! I thought we would float away down the sewer drain, a frozen little ark of mud and brown sticks with nothing green in it at all. The daffodils have been at half-staff for months, dull and motionless.
But now! New tulips and more daffodils. Crocuses in bloom everywhere. The furry leaves of poppies, stubborn and hardy through the winter, go from strength to strength every day. On Easter Sunday Q brought in a few tiny parsley leaves from last summer -- last year's parsley showed incredible courage and fortitude. I like that in a plant.
It is my hope that tall spires of pink foxgloves will draw the eye upward in the little bed in front, and that I will clear out more of the ivy to make more beds on the undeveloped gospel side of the front. Q has agreed in principle to procure and erect a wooden fence along the front by the road, so that a pleasing array of flowers can spill out in front of it, irises and transplanted summer lilies and blue and white sage; some more lavender, already growing inside and thinking about the future. The forsythias can lean some of their branches on the fence instead of on the ground, where they take root and make too many new forsythias. And I will work again on digging up the ugly railroad ties from along the driveway, so that we can build our low stone wall there and get the pile of stones out of the parking lot at long last.
A garden of unfinished jobs. A garden of ideas that only we can see. Your garden must be wonderful, people tell me, and I tell them that it is. But I know that they might not think so if they saw it -- it is always unfinished. It is always becoming. It is not in a magazine, as we are not. Things in magazines are finished. Things in life never are.
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