Hands in the earth, dirt under the nails, stepping gingerly around the irises and roses trying not to knock buds awry as I weed, pruning suckers (of which there are many this year), and doing my best to assassinate the local aphid population. Aahhh… heaven on earth. And the abundance is beginning… a veritable bloom explosion.
After a week in colder climes, it is so good to be home. And it only took me about five years to begin thinking of the west coast as Home with a capital H after spending the first 40-odd years of my life back east. My CA friends comment that whenever I return from visiting family on the east coast, my speech patterns still change – I speed up, become more emphatic and definitely snarkier. I guess you can take the girl out of NY, but you can’t take the NY out of the girl! Or maybe it’s like that song – more of a recitation, really – in which a man states that everyone should live on the west coast but not long enough to make her soft, and everyone should live on the east coast but not long enough to make her hard.
The pink dogwood, always one of my favorite harbingers of spring when I did live on the east coast, is just beginning to bloom in my CA garden.
Comments welcome