May news

If we are lucky, we have already dealt with this year’s extreme weather event. April’s record-breaking rainfall follows last Summer’s record heat, the ice storm, the hurricane, etc. We are at least humblingly grateful to have escaped the recent wrath of tornadoes. None of us knows when our number will be called.
We are also lucky to have a lot of crops in the ground. Although the weather is threatening to get us behind schedule, we are not yet. But because the fields have been nearly inaccessible the last couple weeks, when the weather breaks it is going to get awfully busy. All at once a tsunami of tasks will beg for attention: the earth will need tilling, a greenhouse full of plants will need to be released, seeds will need sowing, and a giddy blanket of well-watered weeds will need to be knocked back. If we are lucky, much of this can be gotten done before harvest begins in earnest.
Still it is Spring, and hope stretches to and holds the horizon, buzzing like a bee back from hibernation. Plants are perfect green shoots of potential, no bug or beast or disease has trodden a single leaf black. With a hint of imagination one can already taste the succulent future fruit from the mere sight of beds of strawberry blossoms. For a time in Spring, working quietly in the greenhouse, listening to the excited music of birds, still warming up from Winter, preparing the way for a season of produce, I cannot imagine failed plantings or harsh droughts, marauding deer or disappointing harvests.
Challenges of all kinds, old and new, will come. But for now, before the rising tide, let us only be agents of the beauty that is to become and behold the unadulterated beauty that is all around, all over again. Hail Spring!