I’ve Brought the Mediterranean into My Living Room

 

 

 

   It’s the coldest night of the year, thus far, and a perfect time to anticipate the coming Spring. The chickweed will be blooming soon – not just the random splash of color here and there, but the consistent flowering that covers a garden plot. Likewise the dandelion – not the occasional confused little specimen along a roadway, but the early scouting parties. The troupes in a field or pasture that say: there’s enough of us now that you notice us, and get the buckets ready if you want you to make wine. 

   It’s the sprawly little rosettes that I’m waiting for: speedwells and spurges and little violets and a few I’ve never been able to identify. They seem to be what first beckons the bees out of the hives. There will be just a few violet flowers atop a handful of cold little ground dwelling rosettes, but the bees will find them and help themselves to the nectar.The winter has been warm enough – or, not cold enough – that the grass is growing. It really greens up after a heavy rain. That ain’t nothin’. Wait till Imbolg. Wait till we’re closer to summer than we are to winter, when the world starts to push everything upward and everything starts to grow and the roots hold fast to the earth. We’re close. Real close. 

   It’s like starting to push a really heavy wheelbarrow, and you lean all your weight into it, and finally it starts to budge, and you take a tentative step forward – just a few inches, a little fraction of a step – and put your foot down and strain your leg muscles and get the wheelbarrow to keep rolling but its just a bit easier, then just a bit easier still. You lean into it more and try to not let it tip over and take another little step, and finally start to sense that its moving as much from it’s own momentum as it is from your straining. That’s Imbolg.

And it can’t get here soon enough, if you ask me. These frigid nights seem to hasten it, somehow. We’ll only get a few this year that are this cold. I’ve brought a few flats into the house. It’s easier than firing up the greenhouse heaters, just to take care of a few plants that I worry about in low teens and single digits. Tarragon. Some of the smaller rosemarys and lavenders. At the last minute I got anxious about some butterfly bushes and brought a few flats of them inside. They are all on the living room floor – little potted plants with small little green needles poking out of their stems, destined for breakfast.

It’s nice having them inside. I find that I sit with a cup of tea and just gaze at them. The weeds inside the pots hold my attention as long as the herbs, though. Especially a sprawling little violet spilling out of a lavender pot. It looks like it really wants to flower. Like it knows the days are getting longer, and it knows the bees are scouting, and it’s trying to open that little bud, like it’s pushing real hard on it’s wheelbarrow.