Tuesday

Glorious morning! Really beautiful: full of potential, full of early spring light.

In walking to the barn, I glance over at the huge honey locust limbs that are overhanging the western side of my Big Bed. This is where the flowering is reduced by shade. These are the limbs that I want to cut down. This is the tree that Ed is hell bent on protecting from my evil ways.

Still, I keep trying: Ed, we have one, maximum two weeks in which to do the tree cutting. (After that, the buds will get beaten down by falling branches.)

We can go out and look.

I dont want to go out and look if you aren't going to do anything.

So let's not look.

No, fine, let's look.

After inspecting the tree closely he gives me the verdict -- I need a new kind of saw for that, but I will cut down one of the branches for you.

Just one? At least five need to go!

Just one.

If you wont do it, I'll do it!

You can't do anything.

This is the time to pick up one of these oatmeal bowls and throw it at him.

Instead, I have to laugh, because he is of course correct. My idea of "doing something" is to pay someone to come out here and do it for me. But, we don't operate that way. Ed's vetos are absolute, as I suppose are mine, except that I never have any. I always want to forge ahead with even ridiculously complicated projects (remember the time I was determined to get goats?).

I do gently hint that he cannot trim all our trees on his own all the time. (The only reason he gave last week's job to a professional was because the branches extended over the neighbor's property. The neighbor wanted a pro and Ed agreed that it was safer that way.)

I have been doing all tree maintenance here all along.

Yes but you are now 72 years old.

Okay...

I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere with that one. As for the other branches that I desperately want removed -- well, I'm hoping when the special high limb saw comes, I can twist his arm.

In other gardening news, I received a joyous email from White Flower Farm (a nursery where I have been shopping for flowers for some forty years now) telling me that my clematis and dianthus were on their way! Delivery expected this week!

What??

I call the nursery and I get some half baked explanation that these plants can wait for planting until my ground thaws.

Yes, but you cannot be sending flowers to Zone 5 (our planting zone) in March!

Well apparently they can, especially since I appear to have checked off some box indicating a desire to plant as soon as possible! Of course, "as soon as possible" has many meanings and one thing I know for sure -- planting in Wisconsin in March is not possible. Looks like I'll be piling lots of little pots on the windowsill this month!

Snowdrop is here in the afternoon, as usual, and I do try to get her ready for ballet class on time, but this is getting to be more of a challenge, as her hair gets longer and longer (and she adamantly refuses to trim it). 

When I pin it into a bun, she claims it feels wobbly. Not wobbly, just heavy, from all that hair!

Nonetheless, it stays up, and our afternoon ends without a hair calamity, and indeed without any calamity at all, big or small.

Driving home after dance class, I let myself feel that wonderful evening light of spring. Because winter is really a thing of the past. We'll get snow, we'll get cold winds, but they will have the feel of spring. And that's such a beautiful thing.