CAMBRIDGE
OUTDOORS
I enter through the side gate, wanting to feel the freshness of the garden after the rain, admiring the aconites flanking the path as I crunch over snail shells. A robin darts onto a low branch of the apple tree and watches me. I smile and say hello.
There’s no blossom on the Bramley yet, only on the plums. I reach out and run my fingers across the dips in the brick of the shed, admiring the ochres and pinks against the washed moss in the lawn and patches of blue Bossier’s Glory Snow.
Sliding open the bolt, I go inside to a stack of watering cans and terracotta pots, chipped and cracked, rough to the touch, some upturned and one with holes in it for strawberries. A chill drifts through the window that has been patched with plastic.
This is not a place to linger today, though I want to leaf through the seed catalogues with their dog-eared pages offering promises of abundance; prompting excitement at purchases of cosmos and bergamot for a riot of blooms at the back of the vegetable plot.
The onion sets were put in the ground late and covered with chicken wire to ward against the pigeons, amid some lambs lettuce that seems to have survived from last summer and is having another go at growing and honesty seeds that were shaken with wild abandon and have obligingly begun to sprout, thought they won’t flower fiery pink until next year, nor will they dry into moon-shapes of silver in a kind of magical alchemy.
Last night saw a blood worm moon and a lunar eclipse. My grandmother would have quietly planned and planted her garden according to the moon’s phases and rhythms. If only her wisdom had been recorded.
Thank you for reading!
The beauty of the spring is like no other. Brilliant flashes of color amid the brown and grey. The promise of warm yet the chilly breeze reminds we are not there yet.