I'm just happy to celebrate another end of the dreary month of February.
It used to be the month of March when we could expect to see a few crocus shoots coming up out of the ground, soon to be followed by daffodils and tulips. But the last few years it seems like it's very late in the month before that starts to happen, or we even have to wait for April to set things right.
I'm reminded of a poem:
It was a night in early spring,
The winter-sleep was scarcely broken;
Around us shadows and the wind
Listened for what was never spoken.
Though half a score of years are gone,
Spring comes as sharply now as then—
But if we had it all to do
It would be done the same again.
It was the spring that never came;
But we have lived enough to know
What we have never had, remains;
It is the things we have that go.”
― Sara Teasdale
My college days were spent at an upstate A&M with a big ag school enrollment. I noticed a lot of people got acting strange every month of March, something I didn't understand. One afternoon, I asked one of the guys in uniform blazers behind the information desk in the student union building, "How come everybody is so crazy?"
"It's plowing time," he told me. Somehow I understood. My grandfather was a farmer, but the calling never came down to me. Too bad, maybe.
Emily Dickinson says:
A little madness in the spring
Is fitting even for the king,
But god protect the clown
Who ponders this this tremendous scene –-
This whole Experiment of Green –-
And thinks it is his own!