Memorial Day used to mark the start of the gardening season in Ann Arbor, the date after which you could be reasonably certain your new plants would not be killed by frost. Then the garden catalogs began to arrive with new information. This, they said up front, was not a political statement and they did not want to get into any political arguments. It was just their duty, as provider of my seeds and plants, to notify me that my Ann Arbor garden was no longer in Zone 5. It was now Zone 6a. I could start planting on Mother’s Day.

As far as I could tell, this did not initiate any angry letters cancelling orders or detailing conspiracy theories. When your hands are in the dirt things get real: do you want to be the person who shouts the loudest, or do you want to start eating tomatoes and cutting zinnias for bouquets as soon as possible? Expertise may be out of fashion elsewhere, but in the garden it is always in style.

Flowers carry so many associations. They fill the bride’s hand, grace the table on Mother’s Day, wreathe headstones on Memorial Day, and have done these jobs for a long time. Fossil pollen has been found in burials from thousands of years ago; if we had wedding fossils I’d bet there would be flower remnants there, too. Flowers, fragile and short-lived, do a lot of emotional heavy lifting for us. Speaking for us in difficult situations, they are also traditionally used in apologies and fence-mending, activities that always seem to be in short supply right when we need them most. So, grow some flowers. Give them to someone you’ve had a disagreement with. Start a dialogue.

I am at my daughter’s house for Mother’s Day. She has given over her office to be my guest room and she has put a vase of flowers in it for me. This is especially kind of her because she knows she is no longer the main attraction for my visits here. The main attraction now is her little boy, Julius, not quite four years old.

Yesterday we planted things in the small front garden of their city house. We moved a fescue. We took out a flowering shrub that needed more space than it could have. We put in some compact lavenders. We nestled a few succulents around the stepping stones. Julius handled the watering, pulling the curly hose along, pointing its spray nozzle at the new plants, and bending down to them with a big smile.

“They’re singing!” he said.

Why wouldn’t they be, with this small gardener catering to their thirst. He sings too, wet mud on his hands, spitting and humming to imitate the sound of bumblebees, processing life through the discovering eyes of new acquaintance.

But to himself he is not new. He is constant, and complete. He defends this self of his against attempts by surrounding adults to redefine it, even as he adjusts to new circumstances, which come at him constantly. He knows who he is. And if he asked I could tell him that just as he doesn’t feel young, I don’t feel old. You get bigger, older, wiser, and more experienced, but it’s still you underneath, acquiring all these traits. Some of them layer on more gracefully than others, and there are so many to acquire. I think we all know people who never manage it.

On Mother’s Day morning, sharing handmade gifts, we check the garden for signs of progress. The transplants all look happy.

The yard is awash in daffodils. After a long, late autumn and a very late spring, here they are flaunting their variety and splendor, ruffled and bumptious, nosing their trumpets in each other’s faces like cheerful gossips. It’s warm enough to open the window, and the scent of the daffodils blows in.

Daffodils are the clear choice for spring bulbs here, because we have lots of deer. Deer eat tulips, not daffodils. You could plant tulips anyway, curse the deer as the tulips are beheaded and trampled, and join the vast army of trolls contributing only negative comments to the social enterprise. Catastrophizing. Getting so pumped from your own outrage that you lose sight of any flowers, at all.

There is so much of that around today, and it is so dispiriting to see us all blasting accusations at each other, without regard to how the plain truth looks different to a deer than to a gardener. Channel your outrage, and don’t let it derail your investigation into true causes. Lots of things can go wrong in a garden. Be sure you’re fixing the right problem.

Then you can dig out the failures, and put in something bright and healthy that will succeed.

I expected to be outside weeding and planting perennials by now, but the ground is too cold and too wet and not good to stomp around on in its current, compactible state. We’ve had some little lost snowfalls – forlorn flakes blowing around with a what-am-I-doing-here look to them.

The snow up in South Dakota got its act together, though, and is putting on a blizzard today. There’s an Indian reservation in the blizzard path where many homes had their power shut off for having overdue bills. I didn’t want to believe this at first – what kind of Simon Legree would turn off someone’s power in a blizzard? Didn’t the Indians pre-pay all their bills by giving up their land, their hunting grounds, and their means of support?

Social media takes a lot of hits for bad behavior, but in this case it helped. When the call went out for people to step up and pay some of these bills, the power company’s line was busy, busy, busy. I couldn’t get through, but enough people did that all the accounts are now current and the power back on. The larger question of how and why people were left unable to pay their bills and what to do about it is still unsolved, but at least no one’s going to freeze to death this time, in this blizzard.

This small-scale solution happened through personal connection – someone who taught at the reservation told her friends, who told their friends. The people shivering in the cold were no longer “them.” They became “us.” Small-scale solutions are often criticized as being a patchwork, but whole big, bed-covering, life-warming quilts are made that way. Patch by patch. Piece by piece.

We went from snowy to springish in very short order, and suddenly I had to get my seeds started. Doug brought the folding tables up from the basement to the second floor guest room, and I covered them with my collection of cut-off milk cartons half full of dirt. In went the seeds: Black Pearl and Supersteak tomatoes as usual, and a new bush variety I decided to try; Japanese eggplant; and cucumbers for my niece who likes to work in the garden with me. And lots of white Profusion zinnias. Seeds for the big zinnias will go directly in the ground, but I like to give these little ones a head start to help them stand up to marauding woodchucks. My neighbor tells me that when she sees the cartons lined up in that big front window, she knows spring is really on the way.

We had several bursts of very cold weather instead of a steady warming trend in late winter, and I suppose this is why all the flowering things are behind schedule. I know they are because Facebook, helpfully, keeps sending me images marked “last year” and “two years ago today,” and what’s out there now is pathetic by comparison. But the hellebores and crocuses are holding down the fort, and I think there will be daffodils tomorrow. They’re that close to bursting out of their sheaths.

And the turkey buzzards have come back. Ah, spring.

These are the days when the snowbirds come back to Michigan from Florida, and voice their disappointment that winter has outlasted their vacation. As a light snow drifts down, powdering bare patches of ground and outlining tree branches in that particularly attractive, lacy way, I rise to winter’s defense.

First, winter is informative. The structure of trees, the depth of woodlots, the secret nests where birds and squirrels made their summer lives, are revealed both by the absence of leaves and by the snow echoing and outlining them. Shrubs that were a green curtain in summer become transparent, revealing burrows and pathways previously unsuspected. The snow clearly displays the tracks of animals you may never have seen, but which you now know have laid claim to your garden. The clarity of winter explains many things that were mysterious the rest of the year.

Second, it is restorative. There are plants, peonies for example, that do not flourish in warm climates because they need winter to rid them of parasites and buck them up for another round. For humans, it’s an opportunity to sit quietly and think about what to do next, to reassess last year’s efforts, successes and failures, and where things might be improved. This is specifically true of the garden, but not limited to it. Our entire culture recognized this long ago when we located our New Year in winter, in spite of so many other cultures placing it in spring. Spring is a new beginning, yes, but new beginnings go better if some planning comes first.

Third, to wish the winter was over is to wish away a quarter of your life. The older I get the less interested I am in speeding up the passage of time.

Fourth, it is beautiful. Can anyone be looking at the winter-wonderland effect of a snowfall when they say winter is gloomy? Michiganders will see high, bloomy, rolling clouds and say the sky is grey, but if you’ve never lived with the “June Gloom” of the west coast’s seasonal low fog, you do not know what grey is. Yes, it’s cold outside, but you need sunglasses when you walk out in it.

The equinox is still a week away, so winter is entitled to hold the field. I see the hellebores are already shaking out their flowerbuds and the daffodils are nosing up, so those who are impatient for spring can take comfort. Meanwhile, I am going to sit here by the window with my cocoa, enjoying the season at hand.

Here’s another thing that’s sort of the same and sort of different between California and Michigan. The swallows come back to Capistrano about the same time the turkey buzzards come back to Ann Arbor.

The buzzards are better known for coming back to Hinckley, Ohio, which has a festival for them every year around March 15^th. Hinckley is about 170 miles southeast of Ann Arbor, around the corner of Lake Erie, so you would think we’d get our buzzards about the same time. The Bird Count People would agree with you. When I count my buzzards in February, they’re dubious.

But there’s no mistaking buzzards – the cauldron-stirring flight pattern, the unfeathered red heads. They’re early, but they’re correct: the snow’s gone and it’s clean-up time. How did they know?

On Buzzard Sunday in Hinckley (March 18 this year) thousands of visitors welcome the buzzards back from winter break, but our birds here have beat the rush. I see from the Hinckley website that they will have hikes, skits, songs, stories, crafts, contests, and a pancake breakfast with sausage. I’m not sure I’d go for sausage on a holiday honoring vultures, though I guess that’s irrational. And according to The Ohio Traveler, a turkey buzzard’s digestive system kills any viruses and bacteria they ingest. Even their droppings, says Ohio Traveler, are disease-free. I hope some pharmaceutical companies are studying this.

As a sign of spring they aren’t exactly romantic, but they’re part of the pattern of renewal nonetheless. This is a poem I wrote about another vulture, the condor. California had condors, but the ones I saw were in Chile, where I spent many hours staring at the desert mountains to make some of the pictures you can see in my “Paintings” section.

The Condor

He is the grandee of birds,
like a sixteenth century gentleman of Spain,
white ruff around his neck,black wings spread wide
over the prey of the New World,
his head blood-red
but he does not blush,
full partner of creation,
his dark back patched
with a pattern of angels.

published in Cumberland Poetry Review

A nice big February snowstorm did roll in at last. Over the course of a few days it heaped and layered itself across the yard, stacked itself onto branches, mocked the cars, trucks, and buses trying to cruise around like they own the place, and wrapped

familiar objects in semi-disguise. Some features were emphasized and some obscured, recognizable, but surprizing.

The drag-footed deer trails made the backyard look like a freeway map

tracks of deer, not people

drawn by cross-country skiers, and a new track ambled in among the others: possum, a neat line of single-file prints despite her waddle.

And now I have learned one more incredible feature of Michigan snow: you can plant native wildflower seed by throwing it directly onto the snow in February. Amazing, right? But these are seeds that need freeze-thaw cycles to settle them in, and enough cold weather to recognize the change when spring comes. I had tried a fussy process called cold stratification, involving baggies, wet sand, and a freezer, but frankly I have enough mysterious baggies in my freezer without adding Jacob’s Ladder and Milkweed.

Then I got an email from Prairie Moon Nursery with a picture of a woman in a big down coat flinging handfuls of seed onto a field of snow. Do this until March,

seeding site with amusing deer trails

it said. I had some packets of unstratified milkweed seed in hand, so out I went into the white, crunchy yard, where a cycle of thaw and freeze was expected to fill out the week. I didn’t have as much seed as the happy woman in the email, but it really was fun tossing it around like I was feeding imaginary chickens. In the imaginary barnyard. On the actual snow. I hope the neighbors weren’t watching.

I will let you know how this experiment turns out. I mean with the seeds, not with the neighbors.

Our nice layer of snow was completely destroyed by a patch of ridiculously warm weather bearing rain. What an outrage. The great consolation of winter is snow, its sparkle, its grace, the way it covers a multitude of discards and errors, its enormous blankness like a big, empty, brand new notebook. Dead grass showing through is an old draft. I want clean pages of deep snow, reflecting and magnifying the thin winter sunlight.

Because, come on, we know it’s not spring yet. Stop fooling around.

But this morning there’s a scrim of fresh snow on the ground, and cold enough to keep it there. I feel better. Seed catalogs have been sliding into my mailbox for weeks now, and as long as the snow’s on the ground all things are possible: tomatoes guaranteed to laugh at every blight, wilt, and virus known to man; pink marigolds, green zinnias, ruffled cosmos; long vines full of tiny jack-be-little pumpkins; roses safe from deer. The simple dreams of a gardener.

It’s easier to enjoy them, of course, while I sit on the warm side of the window, with my cup of cocoa and my indoor plants. The narcissus is about done and the amaryllis are starting. Geraniums, rosemary, and poinsettias are vacationing in their private tropical island, and will go home to the deck come May. But it’s that slice of snow you see in the middle distance that brings me a happy, settled sense that the world, despite all rumors to the contrary, is going on as it should.

One of my New Year traditions is potting up dozens of amaryllis and paperwhite narcissus bulbs. They respond enthusiastically to emerging from my chilly, dark closet into the brightly lit studio. I know how they feel. Some will sit regally on elegant glass pebbles; some will stand like linemen with their hands in the specially prepared dirt. The paperwhites aren’t particular about this, but the amaryllis like to be up to their round middles in storebought soil, top halves exposed.

Catalogs will tell you they need four to six weeks from potting to blooming, but their enthusiasm leads them on to precociousness. The first narcissus buds swell at about two weeks and they bloom in waves, from those nearest the windows on across the room. The amaryllis are right behind them.

This process is called forcing. Forcing the bulbs. Have I forced them to bloom indoors? Would they rather be outside right now? Their daffodil cousins are happy enough living outdoors, sleeping under a nice blanket of snow at the moment; but the paperwhites would die in the wilds of a Michigan winter. They are being coddled in here, with heat, and warm storebought soil, and water in its liquid state. They stretch luxuriantly toward the window. I may be waking them up, but no more than that. The force is theirs, not mine.