"God's Country"

     It has been a cold and wet few days around here.  The yard (and all the leaves!!) had just dried up enough for two sturdy young fellas to be out there helping us with the end-of-winter cleanup when... WHAM!  The steady downpour last night left puddles and soggy leaves everywhere.  One thing we've learned in the almost 25 years of living "in the country" is there will probably be plenty of new days for working in the yard.  Soon, I hope.  My bones are tired of being cooped up, even though Danny and I have both gotten so much reading done these last few months.

    Secret messages of spring are beginning to pop up.  We have a small bit of trillium still in our back door flower bed from Danny's daddy's camp in the woods around Gloster, Mississippi.  T. Willie was a salt-of-the earth gardener and I can still see him in my mind's eye as he hoed long, long rows of vegetables in a garden bigger than any other I've ever seen.  Those tiny trillium plants always bring him to my heart as we wait for spring.

    Danny's mama, Nadine, had a green thumb that matched that of her husband.  She could get potted plants to do more growing than most master gardeners.  I think that maybe she could have gotten a pencil to bloom, if she'd tried.  Also at our back door garden space is a patch from their yard in Natchez.  Snow drops.  The greenery comes in first and it is full and rich in color this year.  But the tiny white bell-shaped flowers haven't shown up yet so we know there is more cold in store for us.

   Out in the larger yard, the robins have been seen dancing around each other as they compete for worms.  The blue bird pairs have begun their annual house hunting and we see them inspect, leave and then return time and again to our boxes.  No signs of nesting material yet so I guess the their message is "too cold just yet."  The tiny white and lilac violets are beginning to carpet the yard.  They grow and bloom so close to the ground that you don't really see them unless you're walking in the woods.

    Friends who first visited us back in 1989 when we moved into this house told us the property looked like "God's country."  Probably because it was isolated from the city sprawl and we had lots of trees.  We've been slow to change what was here when we started our lives together but every day I see God's hand over our land and our lives and I give thanks.