It is Easter Sunday today and the story in the garden is one of premature endings. After the freezing temperatures and intermittent snow, the spring blooms are burst and wilted. The winding cycles of the seasons means this one is over and it waits til next years promise to be better fulfilled than this one has been.
Life is a little like this. In fact, I often see life’s lessons illustrated in gardenesque parables; this one is no different. How many times are our hoped for plans changed by a shift of the weather of our destiny? This year was one of these for me, and the week’s wilted spring blooms around me are a symbolic picture. I empathize, vibrate with the present conditions. If it had continued to bloom gloriously, unmarred? Then I would have learned the lesson of hope and finalized fruitions. That is what I yet look forward to, since that is the cycle we have seen so often, life, death, and its continuing song through the seasons.There are surprising successes as well as surprising failures, there are completed expectations as well as incomplete endeavors, and it is all spoken of in our gardens.
The magnolia’s blossoms are the color of bruised flesh and hanging like forsaken handkerchiefs on their twigs. The daffodils hold their color until the warming sunshine draws away their remaining moisture, and then they are wrinkled like old yellow crepe paper. Icicles were hanging from the green leaved viburnum…. and the forecast is for a damaged, maybe lost, fruit crop. Yet, I remain happy for the previous weeks beauty and memory of colorful spring growth. Spring is always ephemeral- just this year it is a little more than usual.
The garden again adjures us to not plant tender things too early.
