Waiting for Spring

There comes a morning in February when you can step out on the deck in your nice fleecy robe and not have your ankles freeze immediately. Instead, there's a friendly little breeze from the south insinuating itself under the edge of the robe.
You know that it's the advance warning of another storm coming from the west, but who cares? Right now it's a little thought of spring, and you nearly run out in shorts and sandals. Nah, we're not that silly. It's still socks and mud shoes, heavy sweaters and coats, and sometimes gloves.

Still, things have changed since early February, when the last snow covered everything in marshmallow. We've been through a couple of weeks of mud season, and the snow is finally completely gone (except for the patch on the north side of the house. That's where the dogs come and go from inside to the back yard, so it's been covered in mud and is therefore, like permafrost, insulated from the warmer air). The mud is still making oozy puddles here and there, but we get around it. In the shade house, where it was the worst for a while, we tiled the path in excess cardboard egg boxes (I always tell my customers at the market that, yes, we do recycle the boxes, but I don't always tell them how we recycle them).

It's now fruit-tree pruning time, so I took my pruners and

loppers in to be sharpened by our wonderful knife-sharpener

at the market last weekend, and I've begun making inroads

in the apple trees. Not all at once, of course--my winter-flabby muscles aren't up to it all in one day. But it's a start.

And last night, just for the heck of it, I took a digging fork and tried digging up some of the Jerusalem artichoke patch, thereby making a big discovery. All these years I've thought if the compost pile was frozen, the ground must be also, so I never tried digging this early. Hah!--another incorrect assumption! The soil at that end of the garden bed was not only not frozen, it was easy to dig, deep and dark, moist without being muddy. And the artichokes were big, supremely crisp, and sweet.

Today I finished with the part of the artichoke patch I'm going to harvest this season, and I ended up with two whole gallons of the knobby things. There they are in their bucket inside the cooler, waiting to go to tomorrow's market in Santa Fe. I hope my customers are as thrilled as I am, particularly since, as much as I enjoy them, there's no way I can eat 2 gallons of them by myself, and I know from experience that the turkeys won't eat them.

Speaking of the turkeys, suddenly all the birds are displaying for all they're worth, and the morning is full of the sounds of turkeys, guineas, geese, and of course the peacocks trying to attract as much attention as possible from the opposite sex. Harriet the goose is looking for a future nest site, and I'm trying to make sure I know where it is. We won't let her raise her own babies--we really don't have the proper conditions for a goose to hatch eggs--but I can sell goose eggs 'til the cows come home. And since we don't have any cows, we keep selling them until Harriet and Beanie get tired of laying them, sometime in the summer.

But best of all, while I was taking a breather from digging up the artichokes, I heard something like a turkey comment, but fainter and coming from a long distance, and I looked up, trying to focus on what I knew should be there in the sky. It didn't take long--there was a large skein of sandhill cranes high up, heading due north. These weren't the few birds that have been visiting the Moriarty fields from over the mountains to the west, where they spend the winter in the bosque along the river; these were a very large crowd starting a serious journey, all calling goodbye for the summer. How wonderful! How wild!