second day

I love spring. All of it -- the good and the bad. Only a day that was so full of important family moments would keep me from noting this all important seasonal transition that took place yesterday. And now it's the 21st of March and we are already on the second day of spring!

(Tuxie, our extraordinarily beautiful and shy cat, looking out)

 

 

At the farmette, each day of this season is important: will it bring enough sunshine? Enough rain? Will the ground freeze recede in time, so that we can plant our peach trees (which are hiding bare root in the fridge until the right moment)? 

We talk about this at breakfast.

Ed is ready to do this year's tomato planting (seeds into cups, cups under a lamp inside), but I don't join him in this project just yet. I have my scheduled Zoom call with my friends in Warsaw. 

We are a somber lot.

I note to them that for the first time in two years, we go through two hours of conversation without once mentioning the word Covid. With just a few detours, we spend all our time discussing the war in the Ukraine. The devastation. The resistance. The displacement. Warsaw, like all cities in Poland, is filled now with Ukrainians, some living with some of my friends, and friends of friends, and so on. The stories are of cruelty, of inevitability, of heroism, of disorientation, trauma and uncertainty.

 

So it's hard to switch over to spring highlights once I'm off the zoom call. But I have to try. In addition to doing all that we can to help those, say, in Mariupol, which is quickly becoming another Aleppo, destroyed according to the same playbook of total erasure --  in addition to support offered there, we must hang on to what's preciously important here. Even something as trivial in the scheme of things as planting tomato seeds and peach twigs.

(The seeds are in for the year! The peach trees will be planted in the next week or so.)

We walk the farmette lands, pausing at each nut tree we planted last year (all 67 of them!), to check on progress and to fix cages where needed. Some trees have small buds, others still look like twigs. In a few weeks we'll know for sure which will need to be replaced.

It's a beautiful spring day today. 74F (23C). Stunning. In this, in the tiny buds, in all that's loving and good in this world, we find hope.

With love...