“There is a garden, verdant, beautiful…”

Well, maybe not today, but spring is continuing to make inroads at wresting control of the seasons from winter. The title of the post is the first line of a poem by Reyvrex Questor Reyes titled “Love Sonnet 58 There is a garden, verdant, beautiful“. Lucy would have liked the poem.

Several days of above freezing temperatures and several nights of light fog have devoured about five inches of snow cover in my back yard. The calendar says April but the weather behaves like March. While the yard is not verdant yet, its color is showing a green tinge in the brown. The front yard has a couple of snow piles created by the snowblower. After pulling back the leaves that had piled up in the gardens last fall, I was happy to see daffodils and squills poking through. Some areas of the yard remain frozen solid and other areas have thawed to about two inches down. Yesterday’s snowfall was a reminder that the weather in Minnesota s unpredictable. My yard looked like it had a bad case of dandruff and it melted later in the evening.

I have mentioned a couple of times that Lucy enjoyed poetry. She had a “Nothing Book” in her nightstand where she had transcribed poems that she liked. Julie gave Lucy the “Nothing Book” on Lucy’s 22nd birthday in 1980. The first poem Lucy had jotted in there was a haiku from the James Bond story “You Only Live Twice” by Ian Fleming:

You only live twice…
When you are born, and
When you look death in the face

We both enjoyed baseball, a game played on a verdant ball field. It is a game that spans three seasons and we would enjoy it on the radio while we worked in the gardens or were out for a walk. A. Bartlett Giamatti, a professor from Yale who later became the Commissioner of Baseball, had a quote in “The Green Fields of the Mind” which sums baseball up nicely:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

We went to some games at the Metrodome and wished we could be outdoors…except for one game when a severe thunderstorm roared through. Watching the Teflon roof bounce and seeing the flashes of lightning through the fabric made for an interesting evening, but we stayed dry. I was fortunate enough to see some Twins games at the old Metropolitan Stadium, now the site of the Mall of America. Lucy wanted to see a game at Target Field and to attend a St. Paul Saints game at Midway Stadium, and I plan to do both during this baseball season. Let me know if any of you would be interested in joining me.

I hope the weather where you are at is acting more seasonal than it is here. Give your loved ones a meaningful hug, try to get out and enjoy nature, and “root, root, root for the home team”.

Leave a Comment

Filed under gardening, literature, philosophy, rebuilding, weather

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.