Of Calendars & Vegetable Gardens

Calendars lie. You may not be aware of this, focusing as you do on the innocent-looking pictures hanging beguilingly above the inflexible square lines of dates & weeks. You see, calendars, when you look at them, encourage you to move your eye upwards, to gaze at the beautiful picture above where the real information rests. For instance, I have two calendars in my room. If I were a sensible person, and prone to be on-time & logical, I would have 2 calendars because, when I'm on one side of the room, I may not be able to read the dates on the calendar haning on the other side of the room. Or, I could keep one calendar for work-related activities, and one calendar for family-related activities.

But I'm not logical, and I am definitely prone to being a wee bit late for things. (My fondness for sleeping is no doubt to blame.) And so, I did not purchase said calendars to keep track of my dentist appointments, or when the next work party is coming up. No. I purchased my two calendars for the pictures, pure & simple. On one calendar, there's a bunch of artwork involving dragons in some way. (Forgive me. I just like dragons.) On the other, there's artwork done by Kinuko Y. Craft, who does the most exquisite work for book covers, among other things.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes. Calendars lie.

My point is that despite the differences in the things depicted in the artwork in both calendars, they both tell the same lie. The month, right there at the top of all of those hard perpendicular lines reads, as clear as day, "March."

Now, I ask you: does March involve wildly fluctuating temperatures, ranging from 60 degrees one day down to 22 degress the next? Does March involve starting out with warm winds & green things & not three days later having 2 feet of snow fall in a single afternoon? Does March give us hope for spring and the continuance of life and just as suddenly snatch it away? Does it???

Oh.

Well, I guess it does.

At least here. Where I live. In this place where March is both warm and cold.

So, how do vegetable gardens come into this, you may ask. (And if so, should I have included a question mark in the last sentence?) They don't really come in much--only that despite the warming & colding & raining & snowing we've had here lately, our little vegetable garden patch in the backyard still has an unvarying 6 inches of snow covering up the remnants of last year's forgotten & squashed tomatoes & peapods. I know. I walked out there on Sunday. And boy, were my feet cold.

So, it's still chilly here. Despite the tantalizing tastes of warmer weather our fickle environment has been throwing at us. (Darn the thing.) And while I'm tired, so tired, of all this winter, still there's a sense of beauty that still breaks through my anti-cold sensibilities as I watch the setting sun cast light & shadows across the snow-covered mountains, turning them from pale yellow to bright orange, to pink, and then to grey. And of course, since there's a gibbous moon tonight, there will be the best thing of all: moonlight on snow.