I know I just wrote on Wednesday when we returned from our trip to Florida and not much has happened since then, but I’m a creature of habit and so I write again – for the therapeutic benefits of writing more than to give out any news. The days following our return home were a bit bleak for me. It’s usually that way after my routines and schedules are interrupted by travel, adventure, or a holiday and then I must go back to them. It seemed especially so this time. After a week of 80 degree, sunny weather, it was disheartening to come back to 40 degree gloomy weather. Spring had progressed impressively while we were gone. When we arrived home, I was pleased to find my flowerbeds full of hyacinths, daffodils, squill, and violas in full bloom. Tulips and muscari were in bud. The lilacs and the fruit trees had broken bud. The lawn was green again. It looked like spring had taken hold at last. I also found a lot of very healthy, rambunctious weeds that need tending to and I wanted to get out and get my hands in the soil right away. My list of projects was beckoning for me to begin. But nature had other, crueler plans. Thursday was cold and rainy. I didn’t do anything outdoors but the necessary chores. Then Mother Nature decided to get even meaner and treated us to snow on Thursday night. It wasn’t much, just enough to make me sad when I looked out on the world on Friday morning. It knocked down the taller daffodils and hyacinths. It all melted by the end of the day, but the cold lingered. On Friday I was also back in school. The old routines and schedules began again. By then it seemed I had only dreamed I’d been away.
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| Wednesday evening. |
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| Friday morning. |
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| Saturday morning. |
I’m almost ashamed to admit that I spent most of those first days home moping around. I was not motivated to do anything in my spare time but sit by the heater and look back through all the photographs we took while we were in Florida. Oh, I had things to do indoors while I waited for the weather to clear. My houseplants needed some attention. My little shelf of struggling orchids seemed so pitiful after the glorious blooms we saw down south. I started six more seed trays. But what little I did, I did half-heartedly and with much sighing.
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| Starting more seeds. |
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| Six more trays planted. |
By Saturday the weather had begun to moderate a little. I went into town that morning to get a haircut and buy chicken feed. Coudersport, our county seat and the town where I get my haircut and buy feed, is 1,650 feet above sea level. Gold is at 2,100 feet. That 450 foot difference makes a big difference in climate. It usually means it is about ten degrees colder in Gold than it is in Coudersport. As I drove into town, I noted that their trees are leafed out more than ours. Their forsythia bushes and tulips are in full bloom where ours are just starting to bloom. When it snowed here on Thursday night and left us with two inches of white, there was none on the ground in town. When I returned from town, I did some work outdoors. It drizzled off and on during the day, but I did what I could when it wasn’t drizzling. I unloaded feed. I repaired a section of chicken yard fence that the wind had damaged. I weeded the strawberry bed and one of the iris beds. I wanted to do more, but the rain prevented me.
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| Things growing on the back porch waiting for warmer weather. |
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| The rhubarb is up! |
Today it is sunny and a little warmer. For the coming week it looks like we will be in the pleasant, but not tropical, 50's and no frost is predicted at night. If Mother Nature throws in a bit of sunshine, I might be able to throw off my malaise and get busy in my garden again.
