The sun is streaming in the windows, yet it is cold, below freezing. I hung the sheets on the line this morning. My hands felt raw before the last clothespin was pinched. Yet, I felt enlivened. The birds were singing that distinctly new song. Those of you who know bird song, could tell me which returnees or spring mate searchers these were, but to my ignorant ear these songs were simply heralding a new season.
This changing of the guard is exciting. The snow is gone and I can search the beds around my home for green shoots and not feel ridiculous as I might in a warm spell in January. But the absence of snow has left a dirge. There are bent, bedraggled plants lying over the walkways, which I once thought looked beautiful with puffs of snow on them. There are beds that I just didn’t get to clean out in the fall and now the task once again lays before me. There is a cracked gourd, a broken plastic shovel and gravel littering the grass. But my negative thoughts are now interrupted. “Read to me what you’re writing,” pipes my five year old. When I’ve finished she is incredulous, that I could complain about the minutest inconvenience of the arrival of spring and the jobs that come with it. “That is what spring is for,” she retorts and leaves me to my lament.
So clean up will be my first warm day task and I will relish the feel of the sun, the worn, wood handle of a garden tool in my hands and the satisfaction of my tidy beds. Next I will get started on composting. For the first time we have our own pile of chicken manure and straw to use in our CompostTumbler. Our chickens have been giving us beautiful eggs all winter, but I failed to register the worth of the pile of coop cleanup that has accumulated until after the melted snow had revealed it. Chicken manure has one of the highest nitrogen contents of the animal manures and we are ready to put it use. Twittering birds and all, I’ve got the fever.
