Thursday, January 31, 2013

Open and Shut

or A Change in the Weather

Some winds close you down, slam!  A cold, hard gust smacks into you, and suddenly you're huddled around yourself and sprinting indoors, with the door banging shut behind you.  Other winds open you up—the warm, wild winds that smell of freshness, and maybe rain.  They lure you outdoors to stand tall and stretch and breathe deeply, as if you were a fish in water, and your whole body were gills. Those are the adventure winds, the ones that make you wish you could sweep out into the world on their tails, rushing away over the desert and straight up the sides of the Sandias—and from there, who knows.

We've had a little of both this week, the opening up and closing down, stretching out and huddling in.  The weekend gave us a warm wind and a rainstorm, and clouds that scudded low and fast across the sky and came just shy of thundering.  It could almost have been spring.


Spring is an opener, too.  Even the thought of it can set you to adventuring and make a world of possibilities open wide in your imagination.  When the thought coincides with warm, fragrant air and a wind that feels pleasant through layers of fleece, you find your senses quickening, your spirit stretching out in new ways to life. 

When that happens in January, you start to wonder if you might be forgetting something, like February. 

I believe there may even be a bud on that front crocus...

So I was doubly glad to see those crocuses coming along.  The leaves have been up for a while, but they're beginning to open out in the sunshine, rather than staying huddled in a tight sheaf.  It's good to know that if I am mistaking a fluke of the weather for a Sign that gardening season (which is not really the same as Spring, but close enough) is at hand, I am not alone.  The garden seems outright convinced of it.  It's unfurling new leaves, and not all of them belong to crocuses.

Those are genuine raindrops!  (Also golden columbine, Aquilegia chrysantha v. chaplinei 'Little Treasure')

As the work week began the weather changed, with cold, slamming winds and a sudden drop in temperature outdoors, and a duck-your-head-and-work-to-the-deadlines end of January indoors.  A friend blew into town in the midst of it—a long-lost kindred spirit and her father, on their way from Texas to Oregon and then to Taiwan.  We enjoyed a whirlwind dinner before they swept back out into the world on their trip across the desert.  I've found myself looking up in wonder since then, remembering in the midst of a shutting-you-down sort of week that breath of fresh air.  

Now the weather is changing again, with beautiful timing, just as the weekend is...if not knocking at the door, at least coming up the walk.  It should be warm and springlike, with a good breeze blowing, maybe even an adventure wind. 

You can never really ride the tails of those winds, you know.  They just open you up to possibility, and suggest wild vistas to your imagination.  They make you itch for the adventures that stand before you.

Another raindrop!

Let the gardening begin.

18 comments:

  1. That cold, hard wind that almost break the door off the hinges have been visiting us in London the last couple of days, it has felt like my house has been ready to take off many times. Not my kind of gardening weather, even if the sun is trying to shine - too cold for my aching joints. I have been watching my garden from my kitchen window and I am itching to get out and do something! Saturday seems like a promising day here, hope it will be for you too!
    Take care, Helene.

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    1. Helene, that wind sounds vicious--at least our winter winds are dry, nasty ones and not damp, nasty ones! Hope you were able to get out and satisfy that itch to do something, and that many more promising days are in the forecast. (Ooh--just checked the London weather, and it doesn't look promising at all. Harrumph!)

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  2. You sum it up perfectly Stacy, though here, at least, we are getting more huddling winds than take off on adventures ones. But as you said, it is only February. I noticed some of my crocuses almost flowering today, so I hope they last long enough to open in a dose of warm sunshine, maybe at the weekend, since our forecast sounds strangely like yours!

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    1. It's kind of cracking me up that we had the same forecast for a while, Janet--almost worth writing in to the Farmers' Almanac or something, just to record the phenomenon. Hope your crocuses have come out to play and look cheery and springlike. Our huddling winds have returned this week, and we may even get some rain with them! That would be another one for the record books. (If it happens.) (Which it probably won't.)

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  3. Nice to see your blue sky again. I haven't seen my garden for 2 weeks so can't wait till tomorrow. Hope I don't get blown away.

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    1. Hope you managed to get out and work/play in the garden, b-a-g. Two weeks is a long time of withdrawal! We have cloudy skies today, and I am trying not to complain. (We are total weather wusses out here.)

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  4. Yes, yes. The start of gardening season is not the same as spring, even though spring comes close behind. And it has started here, and I am loving it! I always wonder, however, which plants I have accidentally murdered by my over-zealous weeding. I pulled up some crocus leaves yesterday, and realizing what they were, stuffed them back into the earth. I hope they forgive me. Loved your images.

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    1. Holley, all those new, beautiful growing things are so exciting this time of year--and it's exciting just to get out in the garden and see some new bud fattening or rosette of leaves growing every day! Re: the crocuses, I think the moral is not to weed...

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  5. I have often wanted to ride the warm spring winds with the hawks...floating above the earth. For me it is the opposite with the onset of spring...spring starts in mid March officially and then the garden season opens a few weeks later...we are buried again after a one day massive thaw...cold blustery winds road in with the snow and now we are settled in for more winter...but under the snow I have lots of growth happening...it acts like a snug blanket. I see a bud in the front crocus...makes me long for spring.

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    1. Donna, I well remember how painful that delay was, between the start of "spring" and the onset of actual nice weather. At least the snow sounds so much better that that odd non-winter you had last year (it sounds better from here, at any rate!)--your plants will have some protection from the cold and the deer and some moisture to spur them on once spring sets in. And spring will set in--hang in there!

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  6. Hi Stacy, I'm getting itchy gardening fingers too and my crocuses and aquilegias are at the same stage as yours. Sometimes it feels like Spring, but there is still February to get through. The winds here have been fickle recently, sometimes blowing warm from the south, but then changing to blow from the east. Although we're in the south of the UK, easterly winter winds are bitter and punishingly cold and they cause the plant losses. This coming week is set to yo-yo in temperature again.

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    1. Hi, Sunil, it's at this time of year that I envy people with greenhouses a LOT, because you can get out and putter with real, live growing things and not feel like an idiot for, say, sowing your radish seeds a month too early just out of sheer rebelliousness against winter. (Not that I've ever done that.) I hope the winds have been behaving themselves a little better for you lately.

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  7. this morning we had the first 7 mm of rain. Let the gardening begin comes closer!

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    1. Yay for the onset of autumn rains! Hope you have a good wet season ahead, Diana, and a very full Ungardening Pond for you and the birds to enjoy.

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  8. Hi Stacy, can it be crocus season again? So soon? Better believe it. I have some in flower already at the Priory. And gosh yes, The Wind. We've had gales howling down the English Channel aimed directly and specifically at our house. Goodness but the noise as it roars over the roof. Hunkering down and throwing another log on the fire is all we can do. Gardening (and spring) will just have to wait awhile. Dave

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    1. Wow, at least our winds don't get all personal like yours do, Dave. They're just kind of universally malevolent. (Though I could suggest some targets to them, if they would but ask.) Hunkering down in front of a fire doesn't sound half bad, really.

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  9. Stacy, As you probably remember from your years in the northeast, our slamming winds come from the northeast and northwest and the mild winds from the southwest. We've been having lots of both lately, sometimes on alternate days; sometimes in alternate hours!
    It's great to see your crocuses coming up. Indeed, let the gardening begin! -Jean

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    1. Ah, one of those bipolar winters--at least those offer some respite now and then, Jean! Colorado, where I grew up, can have huge weather differences day to day in winter, and I've always thought of that as more normal than winters where the cold just settles in to stay. Hope your Gettysburg garden is beginning to show signs of being antsy for a little action!

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