BEING SEEDS

Last night after a cold but sunny day of casual work in the garden and firewood (chainsawed a big stash of cherry from the landscaper below) I was beginning to think we’d had our last frost and Spring is here, when I looked out the big front window before heading to bed last night and there was already a big white BAM! on the deck, and snow was falling heavily in fat flakes.

So Spring is NOT here yet, nyah, nyah, said each flake, my potseeded lettuces getting more anxious by the day, like the beginning bergamot, dill, thyme and Italian parsley, all bent in green eagerness from their little pots toward the window each morning to sense what they can about the weather and the temperature out there, is it time yet, is it time? Are we there yet? sussing out the day length and all that other stuff plants know so much about, wind strength, moon phase too probably, angle of sun etc., all that natural computing going on in their stolid green beings. And we think we have the brains.

So this morning down at the ice-covered train station, my thoughts wisping Springy things around in the background there, I gazed at the beauty of the sugarcake mountains powdered with white against the big blue morning sky, when up at the edge of my uplooking eye I saw something moving and looked further upward -- there, coursing along in the high blue were two broad wedges of geese heading north-- in silence, from down where I was, though way up there the air was likely filled with excited chatter at the big goings on.

I stood and watched them go for as long as I could see them, each wedge being 70-100 geese; the sight filled me with the feeling I've been waiting for, the rush I get each year when the unspoken promise is kept once more as nature declares the arrival of Spring, and it came to me what seeds we humans are.