In the span of about two weeks we have gone from grey weather, In which I stepped out our side door and past a four foot snow bank, to a succession of warm days where the sun has beat down and raised the temperatures in our little neck of the woods to seventy five during the day. All good intentions are thrown to the wayside, and we are pulled as if by magnets outside. I shuffle packets of seeds, pour over radishes, melons, tomatoes and beets that seem a season away until I find the Amish snap peas. Purchased when the snowflakes were flying, the seeds offered hopes of fast growing high yielding tangles of vines. Now the white has crept back from the edge of the garden, exposing all the sins and remises of the past season – flattened weeds and wet skins of tomatoes left un-harvested. Following the instructions on the pea-seed packet, I till the soil as soon as it is workable. On the surface the soil is brown and warm, but my fingers dig in and feel the cool wet seeping up to the surface, like the house that signals the changing season with cool lingering in the lower floors, and an intoxicating warmth as we climb the stairs to the upper bedrooms in the evening. The upstairs smell mildly of the attic air that seeps in – warm dust and old cedar shingles. Peas are the quintessential seed – puckered little round forms, they roll around in your palm. Small in my palm they seem appropriate to the girls, and they enjoy pressing the pallid little shapes into the dirt. I have high ambitions in the spring – great plans of expansive raised-bed gardens, brick paths, arbors cascading with beans and eggplant. Tory must rein me in, and remind me of the weeding that come along with the garden, and accelerates in late June and early July. But the warm days of spring are for dreaming – the white snows of winter are fast forgotten and I look smilingly ahead to the warm days of summer. Spring is for planting peas.
