“Roses red and violets blue” comes from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Oddly, his next line is: “and all the sweetest flowers that in the forest grew.” In the forest? Roses? Don’t they need more sun than that? I’m not likely to find out, since marauding deer cavort through my woods all the time. You wouldn’t think deer would eat roses, since they generally don’t like anything highly scented and what about the thorns? But they will chomp happily on roses. Sunlight would be the least of the problem for any roses out there. My roses are tucked safely into their beds in the fenced garden.

Which brings us to the next question: isn’t this a strange day to celebrate with roses? Even in the non-winter we seem to be having in Ann Arbor this year, there are no roses sprouting, let alone blooming, in the garden in February. When I lived in California there were no roses blooming in February either, because January was the time to prune them, hard, all the way back to bare sticks, so the poor things got a rest in that frost-free climate.

No, I’m afraid our nation relies on immigrant roses for Valentine’s Day, doing the work our native sleepyhead roses shun. Will foreign roses be allowed into the country? They mostly come from Latin America – what about that wall? Maybe it will be ok if they’re long-stemmed and say they’re coming in for beauty pageants.

And right on that cue, the doorbell rang, and red roses appeared on my doorstep. Their country of origin is undisclosed, but I see they have a sponsor. Thank you, Doug.

It is time. The seed catalog has called, and I answer. My resolve to deploy a smaller army of tomato varieties in my not-enormous garden weakens. What am I to do when confronted by all these admirable traits, painstakingly acquired and voluptuously displayed in the glossy pages of the seed vendors of the world? Their names alone are so inspired, so evocative, that entire novels could be written just by listing them. Or anyway, short stories:

On a Cloudy Day in Oregon Spring Indigo Rose, Defiant. She was a Summer Girl with a Hungarian Heart and though she was the Patio Princess she refused to make an Heirloom Marriage with the Black Prince. Big Mama and Big Daddy had already invited Madame Marmande, but that was too bad. She wanted a Better Boy. As the Skyway flashed with Red Lightning bright as the Fourth of July, the prince’s henchmen, Jersey Devil, Martian Giant, and Bloody Butcher, rode up to the castle on a Bobcat, throwing Cherry Bombs, looking to capture the Damsel. She quickly dispatched her Orange Pixie on its Crimson Sprinter to get word to her Champions, Gladiator, Super Sioux, and Mortgage Lifter, who rode down the Big Rainbow on Green Zebras to defeat the Big Boys, reducing them to Carbon. So the princess put on her Zapotec Pleated Pink Berkeley Tie Dye Cherokee Purple dress, invited a Celebrity or two, and they all sat down to eat Supersteak, Pork Chop, Black Pineapple, and Chocolate Stripes while drinking Cherry Buzz and Brandywine. At last, in a Sweet Zen mood, the princess decided Mr Stripey was a Longkeeper and took him home to her Red House Free Standing where they live in Peacevine Harmony. Oh Happy Day!

Yes, those are all really names of tomato varieties, and there are enough other plot-provoking names left over for a sequel. But don’t worry, I’m not going there.

This week brings up a question that has especially puzzled me since I began gardening in Ann Arbor: why do groundhogs get their own special day? I’m not aware of other holidays dedicated to clumsy thieves. Is it an attempt to lure them out of their burrows so they can be disposed of before gardening season starts? Tell me anyone around here really believes there is a choice on February 2^nd other than six more weeks of winter.

The thing that bothers me most about woodchucks, aka groundhogs, is that when they waddle over to eat the blooms off the tops of my deerproof flowers, they smash everything else in their path. I get that they have to eat, but do they have to bash up all the other growing things while they do it? It’s true they dig such excellent tunnels that foxes will sometimes run them out and move in, and foxes kill mice, voles, and other crop-eaters. But this can hardly be counted as a direct benefit of groundhogs, since they will fight tooth and claw to prevent it.

Right now my local woodchuck/groundhog is no doubt hunkered into her burrow for the winter, but is she sleeping? Or binge-watching Netflix?

It’s the color of girlhood, the flag of female babies, the shade of aspiring princesses and ballerinas, and for years I was prejudiced against it for the girly, ruffly, dismissability it carried with it. When the call came to knit pink pussyhats for the Women’s March, I wondered at my own pink-misogyny, and decided to reassess.

Being a writer, I looked into the derivation of the word. Words have back-stories as well as living, flexible presents, and the connections can be strange. Here I was merrily on my way to a dissertation on garden flowers, the pinks I know best, when I was brought up short: the word “pink” originally meant a small coastal fishing vessel. Even the most stalwart scholars have had trouble figuring out how we got here from there – “derivation unclear,” they say – but in broad outlines it is, or might be, something like this: the boat was small; the word began to stand in for any of the smallest things in a group, for instance your pinkie finger, or the smallest flowers in the garden; then to one specific small flower; then the color of that flower (and the shape of that flower’s ragged edge, “pinked”). It became the canonical female color when a little girl whose grandmother called her Pinky – smallest member of the family – commissioned a portrait of the girl wearing the color.

Several friends questioned the wearing of pink pussyhats for the Women’s March, since we don’t want to be cute and non-threatening. But why not reclaim the color for its assertiveness, its kinship to the powerful red, and the way it matches the inside of my cat’s mouth when she shows her fangs. She kills things with those fangs. Let’s reclaim the fighting side of pink for womanhood. Warning: do not mistake pointy ears and pinkness for submissiveness. I have never met a submissive cat.

While on the subject of the meanings of things, I paged past Imposture, Impertinence, and Implosive, to Inaugurate, with its root in Augury. Inauguration means: to take omens from the flights of birds, then install on the results of their omens; to invest a thing with sacred character. The next word I came to after that was Inauspicious. Like a flight of birds coming too close to a cat.

Another way of looking at the Paperwhites:

Winter, Love

Inside the window, paperwhites
lean jealously against the glass,
appraise the falling snow
for signs that it will not surpass
their raw ability to bring
glory to a winter hour.
But what do the narcissus know?
Saturated with delight
as the glass reflects their faces,
each ice crystal is a flower
to the viewer it displaces,
winter passionate as spring
fields of bloom on frozen lawn
harvest what they grow upon.

first published in Bluestem Magazine
http://bluestemmagazine.com/online/december-2015/winter-love/

We did get more snow, but the weather here has gotten cranky and they say the snow will be rained out and snowed back again before January is over. Something like that is going on outside right now – hard to say whether what’s falling is rain or snow. I saw footprints that looked suspiciously like the woodchuck, who should be asleep in her burrow until next month. She would not have seen her shadow this morning, but there’s nothing for her to eat so she’d be wise to go back to sleep. I wonder if she knows about Punxsutawney Phil. How did he end up getting all the woodchuck glory? Do you have to be a male woodchuck to get the job, and if so, how do we know Punxsutawney Phil qualifies? Did some foreign agency help him out? Are the deer behind this? I wouldn’t put anything past the deer.

The narcissus bulbs I potted up indoors after Christmas are starting to bloom, filling the space vacated by outgoing bells, holly, and red ribbons with snow-colored flowers and head-spinning scent. It’s said that their fragrance, rather than their appearance, is responsible for their name: Narcissus, intoxicating to the wood nymphs. In English, we call this variety, the one that’s too tender to be outdoors in northern climates, the paperwhite. This name is most agreeable to a writer; and maybe that’s what makes me put so many of them into saucers full of pebbles or pots of dirt, set them near my desk, water them, and hope. Other narcissi – big yellow jonquils, white, yellow, and even pink daffodils – are waiting patiently in their beds in the yard and garden, for spring. Because I nudge the paperwhites into bloom in January, they represent winter to me, not spring: winter as pure beauty. Winter to be appreciated for itself, not as a way-station to somewhere else. This is how I look at them, as a kind of indoor snow, but the paperwhites themselves lean against the window glass. They grow toward the slowly increasing hours of light.

No sooner did the hysterical promises of extra-super-delivery-in-time-for-Christmas catalogs slack off, than the deluge of seed catalogs began.  I’m as into seed catalogs as the next person – well, okay, I’m way more into seed catalogs than the actual next person, since that’s Doug – but really, I need a break. I need to look out the window at the yard and garden and be at rest. At peace with the pilfering deer and marauding woodchuck, the weeds, the weather, the kinky hoses. If the seed catalogs come, can the garlic mustard be far behind?

Besides, I have some issues to work out before I go near the seed catalogs. Maybe some New Year’s resolutions would help. Resolved: to stop raising forty seven tomato plants from seed when I can squeeze out room in my garden for thirty at the most. Resolved: to limit myself to three kinds of cosmos and four of zinnias instead of getting carried away, which that is not, in case you wondered.

But I resolved long ago to make only resolutions I’m able to keep, and these aren’t them. Though I have turned their faces to the wall, the seed catalogs lurk. Red cheeks of tomato porn and promises of their happy and fruitful consummation with companion-planted marigolds gleam in the late-winter light as I sit by the window, trying to ignore them. The window’s not helping, because the snow is temporarily gone, and the lawn is strangely green.

Come back, snow, I need you. You’ll get your own time off again in April.

Our white Christmas held, though temperatures hovered on the edge of snowmelt. The longest night of the year was past, hours of daylight not obviously growing but very clearly not shrinking any more. Doug put on his Santa hat to bring cookies to the neighbors; I queued up my extensive playlist of Christmas music.

This holiday means many things to many people, and nothing annoys one group like being told what it means to another. The Christian, the Secular, the Druidical, all sides have made arguments for ownership. The central factor in everybody’s story is light overcoming darkness, yet there are partisans unwilling to concede even that their stories have a central factor, let alone what it is. Trying to convince each other of the truth of your faith is difficult, because religious feeling is like love. When you love someone, you know it – it has perhaps hit you over the head with great insistence – but when you try to explain it to somebody else, well, you sound like a babbling idiot. Why do you love him? Because he’s wonderful. This is woefully lacking in detail. The only way anyone will understand it is, if they have been or are in love themselves, and recognize the futility of explanation. Emotional truth is not susceptible to logical argument.

I find that readings of the Christmas story don’t do much for me, with their words that fly in the face of experience. But carols are something else. The music carries with it the feelings of hope, of yearning for goodness, for love, for reassurance that life will go on, that are the universal aspirations of humankind. Music, like love, rises above the need for explanation.

We woke up on the 26^th to a warm rain and a world of fog. A row of deer stood in the backyard, silhouettes barely visible in the mist, like Santa’s off shift taking a well-earned break. It will be cold and snowy again, and soon, but today the grass stands up for the deer to graze, and no wind blows. Life is good.

The sun has come out and the snow is all sparkles, glitter, sequins, and blue shadows, never settling on being just one kind of thing, keeping its options open. It looks so substantial I’m surprised to find my boots sinking into it when I step onto the porch. With a few light sweeps of my broom it flies off like a flock of startled birds rising into the air together, but I see that where I stepped before sweeping, the broom has left behind a perfect, icy image of my bootsole on the concrete. Once I noticed this I took a few steps here and there, sweeping in between, checking it out, until there was something like a dance chart on my doorstep. How to tango with the snow.

Squirrels do seem to pass mostly over the top of it, leaving shallow imprints. Deer leave deep trails that look like they’ve been cross-country skiing. Winter dark comes so early and lasts so long, I don’t see much of the actual deer in late December. I see evidence of them written in the snow, a perfect map to the Deer Highway System, its on-ramps, and its rest stops. These are color photos, but look black and white because I took them at dusk, standing on my balcony looking down. No people walked across this yard. Some other animal tracks are mixed in there, but it’s mainly the deer, high-stepping when they leap with hurry, slow-dragging when they take their time. They prospect in the herb garden, but are disappointed in what they find. This is why the plants there are still standing. But the herd increases every year, so the deer know what they’re doing.

Winter is easy to deal with in Michigan because the inhabitants know it well. Streets are plowed, sidewalks are shovelled, and people who can’t be cheerful in the cold leave for Florida. I knew it was a good sign when I realized the state was shaped like a mitten.

The first snowstorm of the season arrived, on a Sunday, like a sacrament. We were waiting, wondering what happened to it, and then it fell all day, all night, over the tired, empty flowerpots of November, until their frost-wilted remains, no longer a rebuke, were transfigured. We heard the plow scraping in the night as it passed under the second-story bedroom window, and woke to find every twig of each tree made bold with a thick white brushstroke. Monday morning dawned to ten inches of stacked and powdery snow altering shapes and altering perception: a forgotten cushion, an upturned tub, a sledding hill for hardy squirrels, all these were potential to every windblown drift. School, we heard, would be cancelled. Is there such a thing as a child who does not root for the snow?

Zerlina is a California cat. The first time she saw snow falling, she pressed against the window and craned her neck, trying to see up into the sky for whatever was causing this unknown phenomenon. It could have been a flock of big white birds shedding their feathers; I like to think she was hoping for that. We opened a door for our transplanted indoor cat, pretty sure she wouldn’t go far. She took two steps out into the snow, stopped, took the same two steps back – unstepping them – and went and stood on the heat register. She has shown occasional interest since then, and even tested the snow another time or two. Finding it equally cold on each occasion, she has since decided snow is best ignored.

Later in the season I will agree with her, but the first snows show you all over again how beautiful everything is if you stop to look at it. Each of the four seasons does this as it shifts, and it’s luscious to wallow in having these changes right at your door, no driving into mountains or deserts required. They come miraculously, automatically, a gift just for existing. By March I will be hungry for spring, but though I might prefer to adjust the number of months allowed each season – more to autumn, say, or cut February altogether – I do not want to do without them. They restore, inspire, refresh and reanimate as they rotate the world through its possibilities, and I go along for the ride.