I Wish I Could...

 ...I wish I could start off my 2023 garden blog with a blog post full of colorful flowers, composed of images taken just today, right from my garden, blooming happily and weed-less-ly as it is already in my imagination.   Alas, however, I am woe, yea woe is me, and I can show you merely the captured sunrise of three days past Christmas, the morning I returned to this garden from faraway family, this image a pitiful substitute, I know, for the glory of waxy petals and errant bees, of life in full exuberance.  Fire in the sky and remnants of snow on the ground are all I can summon from the past week to draw your attention.

...I wish I could entice you into 2023 with the mysteries of new plants and new plantings, of garden beds created from catalogues and prayers, dreams borne into substance with spade and trowel.   Sadly, however, I can show you only the mysteries of another sunrise, two days after the first above, borne in fog and mist, warm ground shunning colder air, my garden isolated and shunning the sun, cloaked and calm and safe for a moment from the greater world.  The growth and glory of 2023's garden is hidden in shadows, lurking in dried stems and promising seed heads, dormant and patient.  What will come first?   A snow crocus?  A daffodil?  A budded magnolia swelling to burst?

...I wish I could show you, at the onset of 2023, more than bland beige landscapes of grasses past, remnants of a once-green and thriving prairie, brought low by cold and drought and time.  From inside the house, the Flint Hills roll on, golden and yet lifeless from seasonal death, the only visible stirring the flash of a hawk as it pounces on its next meal or the gradual lope of a coyote on its scavenging circuit.  It is an act of faith now to see this vista in my mind as it will be in a few mere months, green and tossed with the wind, fed by rain and sunshine in its eternal cycle of birth, growth, fire, and rebirth.

...I wish I could stay each morning in 2023, restful and still, to witness each day the morning turn into afternoon, verdant buds opening and following the sun's path, blue skies and fluffy clouds, through evening until the sun passes the earth on to moon.  To feel the freedom of time unshackled from job and errand, to pass the days alongside the grasses and dream of tomorrow beside them, sunshine and moisture in time and abundance, forever and ever.   This is my garden as it begins 2023, this morning, and at least I am here, today, present in the present and hopeful for the coming year.

Welcome to 2023!  Happy New Year to everyone!

Sleeping Gnome

This dawn beckons, the first morning of a new year, and yet I find myself reluctant to bid goodbye to the old.  The Year 2013 Of Our Lord was a good year on the Kansas prairie, filled with change and happy moments.  It spanned the building of a barn and the quickening of that simple enclosure's spirit by the addition of  warm-blooded inhabitants to the environs.  It embraced an active and expanding garden, with roses and grasses and shrubs and perennials to satisfy any man and swoon many a maiden.  It connected aging man to growing opportunities, moved impatient gardener closer to Nirvana, and forced change where change needed made.  Experience has added yet another year to this gardener's repertoire, a hedge against the improper choices of youth and recklessness.

On the other face, 2013 brought Japanese Beetles to my garden, and revealed evidence of the existence of  a still unknown creature who likes to root through the soil in search of grubs, destroying iris and daffodil alike.  It brought coyotes, a multitude of white-tailed and quite hungry deer, furry rabbits and long sinuous silent snakes. It oversaw the return of my weed nemesis, the Common Dayflower, to my landscaping, and the rapid advance of a prize blackberry into an impenetrable and unproductive thicket.  It disappointed me with a lack of fruit in the orchard and the disappearance of grapes from the vine.  Snow fell in very late April and Spring was late.  Winter came early in October and deepened in December, shortening the golden period of the garden. 

Perhaps this new year, 2014, is good riddance to the old, best welcomed in its arrival rather than lamented as change.  Today, like the concrete gnome that lays at the foot of my sidewalk, this gardener and his garden rests.  Like the gnome, the garden is cold and dead, brittle and brown from the view of the outside world, inert and languid.  Like the gnome, the aging gardener will also nap today, but indoors, his new resolution to spend at least part of every seventh day this year imitating the gnome, an unread book on his stomach and smiling from a pleasant dream.  With the New Year, and the growing length of each new day, hope and happiness begin again.