Hope: "Il faut cultiver leur jardin"

Mid-Spring, the lilacs are bred, the rains come, the garden planned or planted. Summer is quick in the mind, the heart fluttering or hiding, preparing for the heat & humidity of Summer's inevitable drought & sudden storms.

But this is still Spring; weather is unpredictable and intermittently beautiful & unforgiving, as a Friday's flag, at half staff, semiotically suggested, making a whiplash turn from soft west to hard south.

That means the home stretch was mostly in head wind.

At the far end of the familiar farm pond, the elusive, saintly heron sat, again, watching my car slow to a stop on the gravel of a siding, but she didn't wait through my mad dash across the almost empty highway. Sensing the threat of being captured and over-pixelated, she flew--west & far & out of sight.

But the real gift was back on the other side of the car: neat, new green rows showing Summer's early work has already begun.

Beyond the beauty of the view, and that beauty was significant to bring me some measure of happiness not only for the weekend, one that would celebrate mothers and children, but to remind me that the hopefulness of Spring is always linked to the hard work of Summer.

Hope & happiness are never far from one another. But what we forget is the labor that it takes to keep the landscape free from obstruction and unavoidable ugliness. This was the lesson that these new rows taught me that a low-flying great blue bird did not.

There is a limit to vision, but still we squint our eyes and look. Hope takes work; it’s time to get our hands dirty.