The Snowdrops are Flourishing in the Garden

Spring is here and advancing fitfully but steadily. The Earth is never content. It always longs for change -- discontent and the failure to be happy with what you've got: these are not human "faults".

Snow still lies in little heaps the garden, especially in the low foot-traffic areas and where I shoveled and piled it before leaving for work in the dark winter mornings. It lies in forgotten crusts, like the ruined foundations of buildings, or like childhood fears that look paltry now.

The snowdrops are flourishing in the garden. It's hard to figure out whether to be for or against them. What is their purpose? They hang their heads in abject meekness. Are they delegates from the defeated kingdom of Winter apologizing for the cold and the darkness and hoping for kind peace terms; ones in which there will be a continued place for Winter in the coming months? Perhaps they would like to divide the day and night into times for heat and for cold. It is, after all, already divided between light and dark. Surely Summer can live in harmony with Winter.

Or are they from the workshop of the future, of Spring? A tentative and transitional product between the seasons: a flower with yellow-green flourishes on the petal tips but overwhelmingly snow-colored. The new architects are not free from the style of their predecessors. Late Romanesque is easy to confuse with early-Gothic.

I'm inclined to believe in the snowdrops. Perhaps because I don't fear the cold or perhaps because I am optimistic or perhaps I see how they crumple when the dog races over them in pursuit of birds. It is Spring.