To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
—-George Santayana

Though his health and family had been broken in the process, he’d found his purpose in life — to share the ancient key discovered anew in the garden: if we feed the earth, it will feed us.
I see that is the secret, too, to living. Though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return.
—- Melissa Coleman

Spring comes early in Texas. Spring comes in the middle of winter. The green shoots that will collect the energy, energize the chlorophyll, store the sugar needed for this season’s flowers are already pulling themselves up out of the black soil.

The curve of the leaves is still pristine – not yet tattered by the windstorms to come or eaten by the insects still sleeping in their eggs. On my way to work I watch the green tips poke up, multiply, and spread out to catch the fire of the morning sun peeking over the horizon.

The dead heat, yellow straw and the dry dust is still a long way off, but it will come. Let them grow when they will – while they can.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
—- T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land