As we sipped coffee on our patio the other morning, my wife noticed an opossum ambling across our backyard. Heโs made a home, I think, beneath the floorboards of our tool shed, and he was heading to bed after a night of his usual mischief.
I envied our visitor a bit.
His work had finished for a while, and mine was just beginning. Casting my eyes around the yard, I could see no end of things to do. Another ถถา๕h spring had tapped me on the shoulder, pointing me toward the dozens of chores that crowd my days at this time of year as the world blooms and I try to keep up.
My wife had made a trip to the neighborhood nursery, bringing home a Goldflame honeysuckle as high as my waist and a flat of dianthus, the hearts of its blossoms as bright as lipstick. The plants sit on our porch and await their new destinations, like passengers poised on a platform for the next train.
Iโm not quite sure where theyโll go, but luckily, thatโs not up to me. My job each spring is to clear away the winter ruin, leaving a blank canvas that my wife can slowly fill with form, color and the promise of surprise.
Over two days of cool temps and cloudless skies, I worked our flower beds on hands and knees, inching across the yard as slowly as a shadow tracing a sundial. I cleared away the husks of dead gingers, ripped out a clematis killed by the freeze and cut back a mound of lemongrass that had withered in the cold.
Carting wheelbarrows of dead stuff to a corner of the yard, I made a small brush pile by our compost station. These leavings of winter can shelter birds, frogs, salamanders and maybe even a few friendly snakes. From deep within a nearby stand of bamboo, I could hear rustlings of resurrection, perhaps from a squirrel or a jay doing its secret work.
The presence was one of many I felt during my two days outdoors.
A downy woodpecker took up its perch in an oak, its descending call reminding me of a garden sprinkler tock-tocking across the lawn. A cardinal pierced the morning with its insistent song, maybe serenading for a mate. As I trimmed back the brown fronds of a Sago palm, a football landed at my feet, lobbed across the fence from the boys next door enjoying a pickup game.
After wintering within their burrows of Netflix and cable news, neighbors across ถถา๕h are outdoors and seeing each other more, which is one of the best gifts of spring.
My gardening weekend brought another dividend. A smartphone message told me that my screen time had dropped 20% for the week. Thatโs what happens when you unplug for a while and connect with a landscape slowly coming to life.