The earth is  brown and gray now.  And if you’re a regular reader, you know I don’t like winter, cos it’s cold and dark and long, and I can’t grow garden!  We haven’t had a very harsh winter in terms of bad weather or cold here, but it has seemed like a bleak season anyway.

But the winter has its own blessings.  The brown, gray earth gets to take a rest and be all ready for Imbolc soon, 2/2.  On that day, juices start to move around in the roots of plants, even if they’re covered with snow.  We get to spend some winter nights sorting thru seeds we collected last year and planning, with little maps, etc, how our gardens will look this year.  Hopefully, we get to eat lots of good things we preserved in one way or another from last year’s bounty.

Bare trees don’t look like much fun, but I actually enjoy standing out on the porch looking around, and up. With the leaves off the trees, I can watch squirrels running and jumping and climbing thru the trees.  I don’t get to see that in the summer as much, because of the leaves.  Sometimes there are a dozen at a time in the trees and on the ground, eating seeds I put out and also what my kids next door put out.  Plus 10 or 12 different kinds of birds, flying around, landing on my patio, all looking to see if the kind humans here have given them more food.  Yes, we always have.  They can count on us.

And then, today, there was this at the store near me.

I plant heirloom seeds, so I don’t buy the ones from the stores.  But it’s always a wonderful day when I go to the big store and there are the seed racks! There’s the proof, in case we needed any, that before too long, it will be spring. February and March are not always nice months here, so I need to see the seed racks, and watch the squirrels, and eat frozen, dried and canned things I packed away last year. If I close my eyes as I eat some of those things, I can remember the plants growing that produced them, and be glad that after a while, I’ll grow some more.