Life Returns

Another garden location... never too many, right?

Life is returning this broad river valley, pushing the quiet, gray winter higher and higher up into the mountains. It is good to have this time at this time...

What so recently looked like this...

Now hosts this... beautiful baby spinach greens unfurling from under last autumn's fallen leaves.

The old sorrel - a gift of goodwill from an old (and, might I add, very nature savvy) neighbor up the river - has become young again...

It almost became memory as I began pickaxing my newest garden area but for its reddish-tipped leaves. Oh, sorrel! I am so glad you are so early to emerge! The southern exposed sorrel is my harbinger of spring - I will look for it each year around the time the white swans return to the gray slough across the river, the time when the old snow drifts by the compost pile have nearly disappeared in their grime, just before the tinge of green begins in the most southernly of the grass yard. Sorrel and its distinctive puckering oxalic acid flavor remind me that those fresh, real garden flavors are shortly on their way...

And I am oh so ready.