I haven’t written anything since just after Christmas….Epiphany to be precise. My inspiration seems to have something to do with the church year. I meant to write about the joys of being able to hibernate in a beautiful (and warm) Victorian house, but I was hibernating.
Ash Wednesday has come and gone, so for me the time of hibernating is over, and Spring begins to feel like a real possibility. A couple of weeks ago, Rudy cut forsythia from our house in Gloucester and forced them to bloom inside. This past weekend he brought in more, and yellow twigged dogwood, and the white daffodil bulbs which he planted last fall in pots and put in our greenhouse are now upstairs and starting to bloom. The scent of daffodils is such an harbinger of spring. There are bouquets of tulips and daffodils in the market, I try to buy a bunch when I get the groceries and put them in a vase on the kitchen table. Asparagus and strawberries are cheaper and grown closer to home than Chile or South Africa. I went outside yesterday with a sweater and a winter coat and I was hot. Outdoors.
My oldest daughter was born in a blizzard on February 11, and almost every year on her birthday (she’s 48 now), there’s a blizzard. And one after that, so rationally, why would I be thinking of spring? you ask. I guess it’s because the days are so much longer and there’s something in the air. I remember one year that we had more than a week of below zero temperatures at the beginning of the month…it was bitter and there were feet of snow. I was singing a lot with a wonderful conductor named Larry Hill, who founded the Pro Arte Orchestra in Boston. We had a joke about Larry’s concerts….that the weather was always wonderful on the day of the concert, no matter what went on before. He was conducting a Valentine’s Day concert at Church of the Covenant in Boston on a Sunday afternoon around 4:00. When we went into the church it was about zero and when we emerged it was 40 degrees Fahrenheit….and it was the beginning of spring, the temperature never went down again that year! He died twenty-some years ago on Valentine’s Day, devastating for those of us who loved him. His memorial service was at Memorial Church at Harvard, where he had been a chaplain. The day was awful, everything possible coming down from the sky….snow, sleet, ice in great quantities. An hour before the service the church was packed…SRO and even people on the steps. During the service the Brahms Requiem was performed. The last movement of the Requiem has the text “Selig sind die Tod” (“Blessed are the Dead”). At the first line the sun came out and shone on the roof of Memorial Hall and Sanders Theatre where he had performed so often. It stayed out for the entire piece, and when it was over, went back behind the clouds and the storm continued. I have never forgotten that moment, for me it was a glance into another dimension, one in which Larry somehow existed.
Rudy and I sometimes go out to Laughlin, Nevada (don’t ask), for the International UFO Convention…or we do when Rudy is asked to speak. It’s really an excuse to go someplace warm, and then go to Flagstaff, only a couple of hours away to visit my younger daughter, who was born at the spring equinox. Getting off the plane in Las Vegas is such a nice experience…it’s warm enough! One year I went out into the desert with some friends to see the ancient petroglyphs not far from Laughlin. There had been an unusual amount of rain, and the entire floor of the desert was covered with yellow and pink flowers. In Flagstaff, spring is just beginning. By the time we get back, it’s March and yellow and pink flowers are not very far behind in New England.
The real hope for the beginning of spring for us though, is the New England Flower Show. It’s held every year in March (it used to be the third week) in a large convention center and the exhibits are amazing. Every nursery and grower and solar greenhouse maker are erecting elaborate garden exhibits hoping to win ribbons and attract customers. One walks in the door and the smell of peat moss and blooming plants is a magic passageway to either last year’s garden, or the one that will come up in May. Every year I buy a new citrus tree and a rosemary bush to replace the one which invariably succumbs to something or other in January. Last year, because of the awful economic crisis, there wasn’t a Flower Show, but this year, it’s back! It will be held in a new convention center and a week later, which means I can be sure to get the plants home without their getting too cold. I won’t buy citrus trees this time, because I have learned to grow my own from the seeds of fruit from the ones I have. My Meyer Lemon had a first blooming two years ago which produced only one lemon, but it was huge. We had lemonade from the juice, and dried peels from the outside, and I planted the seeds. Last January I gave one of the teenaged plants to my friend Ed for his housewarming, and I have another teenager blooming right now. The original tree is not much larger than it was when I got it, but it has 9 lemons. I’ve also got babies from grapefruit seeds from organic grapefruit, a Satsuma orange found in a bargain bin at Home Depot , covered with oranges, a Calamondim orange tree which always has either flowers or small oranges, and a Kaffir Lime in the kitchen, which has never bloomed, but one uses the leaves for seasoning, particularly in Thai cooking. I used to have a book called After Dinner Gardening, or something like that, I’ll have to find it again and try out some new things. Potatoes and sweet potatoes are easy. I’ve never been able to successfully grow avocado plants from pits, but maybe I’ll try again, and a pineapple from rooting its top.
Interesting, isn’t it, that Lent is about going into the darkness at the very point when the light is returning?
