I love the spring visit to the garden center. Marigolds, knock-out roses, and ten bags of mulch in the bed of the truck. Plus birdseed, potting soil, a Japanese pencil holly. Labors of love feed, create, cultivate. Like a friend listening without judgment, a teacher explaining one more time, a meal cooked for others, a song written to remind us again of love. Did I? I dig a hole and let the thought leaf out. Did I love enough? How many times I missed a chance to forgive or ignore a slight or let go. But in my heart’s drought, did I sometimes water pain with compassion? Did I seed the world with life? Do I? I set the holly into the hole, straighten it, fill in around the sides of the root ball with soil I soften to crumbles in my fingers. “I hope you’re happy here,” I say. “I hope I’ve picked a good spot and dug a good hole. I hope you get everything you need to thrive." Then I rise from my knees, slower than in years past, but so much more certain of love and what it can grow.
Tag: spring
Beginner’s Mind

Spring cleaning has me
in the darkest corner
of the sunroom with a
stick in hand, wrapping
old webs around the far end
like drab cotton candy.
The spiders staked
their claim last fall,
orb-weavers, I think. I
didn’t get too close,
and nights were longer and
cooler and spent indoors,
so I let them have the corner.
When I reclaim it on a warm May
day, the abandoned webs cling
listlessly to wall and screen
and bench and reach as if alive for
the oar I offer from a far shore.
The weaver of the orb
mustn’t mind rebuilding her home.
It seems to be the point, to start
again from the beginning.
The cardinal builds a new
nest every year, sometimes
even twice.
Moles burrow constantly and
don’t use the same tunnel again.
The hostas in my front yard disappear
completely each winter and always
come back, from a tiny green peek
through the dirt to a maturity even
grander than before, fueled by
energy both fresh and remembered.
Everything starts over. Life
is not always added to.
It is sometimes
begun anew.
Blackberry Winter
It’s that time of year when the world is half awake. Upright, sure. Eyes open, mostly.
Daffodils are history. Redbud color has come and gone. Dogwoods still razzle-dazzle. The elm looks almost full. The maple has already put in a full day’s work.
But the mimosa out front has yet to crack open an eye. The walnut looks as tucked in as the middle of winter.
Gaia hits snooze and back we go to locust winter dogwood winter blackberry winter.
She doesn’t rush things. She lets this one get the worm and that one sleep in.
Everything in due time. Everything in its season.
© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved
The Spring Sun is Different
The spring sun is different from the summer sun.
The sun in summer is omnipotent, omnipresent.
There is no escape from the relentless oven of the summer sun.
It WILL find you. It WILL burn you. It WILL roast you.
A July sun in Tennessee is like being wrapped in a wool blanket
over a turtleneck in a sweat lodge.
The spring sun is different from the fall sun.
October evenings the sun is waving goodbye
from a place in the sky that seems farther away.
It is the recessing sun, the melancholy light of days gone by.
Its passing is honored by the momentary capture of its essence in a backyard fire pit
on a jacket night, under moons full or waxing or most likely waning.
The fall sun sits on the flatlands of West Tennessee and
sizzles its final goodbye as it sinks into the Father of Waters.
The spring sun is different from the winter sun.
January can be so dreary and damp.
The winter sun is often absent entirely.
They say it’s still up there, beaming as always behind a thick cover of clouds,
but I don’t always believe it.
It’s a good thing the red and green of Christmas happens in winter,
otherwise a Tennessee yule would be nothing but grey.
The spring sun beckons like an invitation.
It doesn’t burn; it warms. It doesn’t kill; it enlivens.
The spring sun has a different light altogether,
one that brings promise and joy and flowers.
We are reminded that life goes on.
We are reminded that we go on.
The spring sun is different.


