Hello, I am a crabapple tree. I put on my best crinoline to dance with you, finally, now that we’re well into May. You didn’t know it would take all the way into May? I’m so sorry. I’d have been here sooner, but I was delayed by so many distractions. Playing with unicorns and rainbows. Tying the peonies’ shoelaces together. I wanted toeshoes for myself, but the daffodils ran ahead and bought them all. I got the best dress, though, didn’t I?

Not that winter didn’t have some good points. I loved that fluffy thing she did with the snow. But ice. That freeze-thaw-freeze ice was a bad idea. Sad to say, she’s likely to do that again. We tell her and tell her, and for a few years she behaves herself, but then she gets this glint of mischief in her eye and oh no, it’s ice again. I’m lucky half my branches didn’t break under the weight of it.

Well, she’s gone now, sulking in the stream beds. I’m back, and hope to make up to you for the long wait. Come out to the garden. Let’s dance.

Spring is a suitable time for commencement, beginning one thing and ending another. With four seasons and a university here, time marks itself well: colored leaves, snow, flowers, out-of-town drivers making sudden right turns from left lanes and people walking around with tasseled hats, corn ripening in fields. To everything there is a season.

Thus I have tulips in the garden now, where tomatoes were and will be. This was an inspired suggestion made to me, of course, by a bulb-seller’s catalog. Last fall after I pulled the frost-bitten tomato plants out of their raised beds, I put in tulip bulbs. My daffodils are safe in the open yard, but tulips need to be inside the garden fence or the deer will eat them. The bulbs liked it in there, and produced many huge, beautiful bouquets.

It was especially nice to deck the house with them to celebrate, because this spring our very dear great-niece concluded her time as an undergraduate and set out for her future. The two sides of commencement – we all want the children to launch, but it’s a sweet chapter that’s ending. The tulip chapter is ending, too.

The tomato plants are in the upstairs window, preparing themselves for the time when night frosts are over and they can root down into deep soil and stretch leafily up into fresh air. And then they blossom, and then they bear fruit.