ECHO FROM EDEN

The seed catalogs have begun arriving.  They are definitely designed to make a person drool - filled with colorful pictures of gorgeous heirloom flowers and ginormous, perfectly-formed vegetables.  Exotic blooms for the yard, and drought-resistant, pest-resistant cultivars for the food plot.

It's the dead of winter.  I see only cold, gray sogginess outside my kitchen window.  But the seed companies know that spring is already stirring, in the chilly muck and in my mind.

The sweet-breath-of-spring is blooming now.  I pick a few blossoms every day when I go out to tend the chickens.  Keep them in a tiny bottle on the window ledge above the kitchen sink.  The fragrance is amazing, potent and sweet, promising that despite the cold and gray, yes, spring will be here soon.

The days are noticeably longer.  It was not yet fully dark when I closed up the hen house at 5:00 yesterday evening.

Here we are less than two weeks into January, and I want to go poke around in the dirt.  My grandmother used to say, "Everyone needs a little dirt to scratch in."  This is the same grandmother who grew peach trees from pits, who enjoyed fresh tomatoes until Thanksgiving, who considered Bermuda grass an insidious enemy.

Is it because we are all children of Adam and Eve, because our race was created to tend a garden?  This yearning to be out in the dirt, tilling and planting and tending, while it is yet too cold and gray...this itch to scratch the ground, when we must waitwaitwait longer still for spring...it feels like homesickness.