Ten days ago, I took clippers and crossed the then-bare ground to the fringe of brush that separates our yard from our neighbors. More winter snow was forecast for later in the week, and I wanted reminder of spring for when the white returned. There, in the untended bushes, I cut tight-budded sprays and whips of forsythia and brought them inside; I trimmed some winterkill and put them in a small pitcher of mild water. Then, I waited.
Days passed; the storm arrived, bringing with it the town plows, the new snowbanks, the shoveling; the yard went white…again. The juncos and chickadees and I communed by the birdfeeder. Often, when I passed the table where the pitcher and its stalky sticks were, I checked the buds, and a couple of times I refreshed the water. But like our recent winter, the buds weren’t budging; spring was stalled outside and in.
A few evenings ago, I burrowed into my pillow and dreams, a winter’s sleep even as the season tipped that night toward light; I rose in the morning to a longer day than the night I’d left and trundled out for the sunrise of coffee. I was greeted by a burst of yellow. The forsythia had bloomed overnight.
My mild seasonal mania for forcing forsythia is a gift from my father, who was fond of cuttings and bouquets in any and all seasons. Most of them came from fringes of fields and yards and woodlands rather than from gardens; they featured stalks of grass, sprays of juniper, flowering “weeds,” and, in their season, sprigs of the totem-blueberry (best of all ground-dwellers). Even as I join Henry Thoreau in my enthusiasm for getting out and walking to see what’s at work on any given day in the meadows and woods, I like also the reminder of where I’ve been (and will go again) atop the table in early spring.
A bouquet or spray of flowers is the habit of optimism, a looking ahead…though not too far: I am no futurist; I like to be present. But, even against the current of news and history, I am an optimist, at least under the influence of flowers, a believer in the yellow promise of spring.