Laughing Ravens

    crocus (macro)   What does it mean to "have enough"?  I used to buy a few of something. A few bulbs, a handful of annuals, a couple perennials. Why? Mostly because we were broke, just starting a family, the usual reasons for a young couple. But our scarcity mindset came from not having a clue. What does one crocus look like? What does twenty look like in that same space? Bit by bit, I came to realize what thrived in our little garden.  Now I see crocuses in a completely different light. I dont want one. I want hundreds. I want the ground to be blanketed in rich yellows and creams, whites punctuated with saturated royal purples. And I want to feel that color fill the air. Somehow the radiant color makes the mornings warmer. The buzzing of bees is slow and unpracticed after winter dormancy.    It's easy to want winter to hurry up so that spring can begin. Spring seldom lasts very long. There's always that pressure to dive straight into summer. Hurry...

When faced with the bleak dreary skies of January, it is easy to want to fast-forward into April when blooms start to appear in the garden again. Let me rephrase that. There are two faces of winter. One face is sun-shiny and snow blankets the countryside. The other gives you a side-eye, pelts you with ice pellets, and hides the sun behind thick, unmoving clouds for weeks. You'd never guess that I love winter.  The local expression for this kind of snow is "Ithacation." It consists primarily of sideways snow and ice that nearly always finds a way inside your collar and into your ears.  Every few years we are gifted with the Norman Rockwell "winters of year's past"... and the sky opens up, dumps feet of snow on us and then the sun comes out and everything is still for a brief moment.  So how is one to deal with the interminable time between the rich colors of fall and the ebullient outbursts of color in spring? Around here, that can extend from November well i...