IMG_1707What a great day it was to have five working senses. My nose might’ve had it the best: from coffee to strawberries, lavender, mint and, topping the list, dirt. I wallowed in it like a three-year-old in a sandbox: scooping wet compost into my garden bed, raking it, poking holes, patting seedlings into place. Rainbow chard, Merlot lettuce, Dinosaur kale: day one for this year’s 2 feet by 4 feet vegetable kingdom. Reach high, seedlings! Shake off that greenhouse gloom: you are outside now, kids, and every day, we’re all going to get a few more minutes of this golden light.

My husband and I started our Spring Fever Saturday with a long tromp through the Washington Park Arboretum. For two hours, we were the greenhouse transplants, stretching into warmth and light. IMG_1694Spring in Seattle is like that: everyone turns into happy seedlings, faces pointed skyward, toes in the mud. Or maybe we’re more like a tribe of Munchkins, blinking and wide-eyed as we obey the urging of the sun to come out, come out, wherever we are. The Arboretum trails were thronged with strolling birders and blossom-lovers, painters with easels all along Azalea Way, runners and rubber-booted families in the marshes of Foster Island. What an old friend of a landscape this is for me, I thought as we sat and put our boots back on after wading across a submerged bit of the Foster Island trail. On suddenly warm spring days just like this one, I used to come down here on my bike when I was 12 years old and find a sun patch where I could stretch out in the grass and read, looking up now and then to watch the parade of boats through the Montlake Cut.

IMG_1701 (1) The surprise of spring is this: every single year, it feels brand new. Every year, we get to do it all over again, right along with the azaleas and the marsh lilies and the painters with their easels. Their fresh newness is ours. Our fresh joy is theirs. I didn’t understand that when I was a dreamy preteen, spooling around northeast Seattle on my bike. I never dreamed that grownups in their fifties—such an utterly unimaginable age!—could feel as baptized by Spring as I did.

After our walk in the Arboretum, it was only natural to buy seedlings and go home and put them in the ground. Planting things is not something I did much of as a child. My mom grew up in Butte, Montana, a mining town where gardening was nearly impossible. Her agenda was to keep the rhododendron and lobelia bushes around our house alive and the lawn mowed. And I’ve never been very systematic about learning on my own. I pick up tips here and there from friends, neighbors, magazines and my more green-thumbed sisters, but when I’m in the garden, I always feel a bit like a clueless kid, especially when I’m planting. Did I put this one in the right place? Will it get the right mix of sun and shade? Should I water like crazy or not?

And the number of seedlings that come in one tiny plastic cup always, always catches me by surprise. I felt like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, adding more and more rows as what I thought were four plants turns into eight, 12, 16: a potentially ridiculous amount of lettuce, kale and chard for our household, which currently numbers three.IMG_1698

But on Day One in the garden, that’s not the point. Today, the point is that we’re shaking off winter, those seedlings and I. And the fact that we get to do this every year is astonishing.

Proud to be featured this week on Norelle Done’s SeattleWrote blog.

Upcoming readings:

April 30, 7pm: Her Beautiful Brain reading, The Regulator Bookshop, Durham, North Carolina

May 26, 7pm: Her Beautiful Brain reading, Book Culture, 450 Columbus Ave, New York

 Buy Her Beautiful Brain from the small or large bookstore of your choice. Find a bookstore here. Order the Kindle version here.