progress

It is not so cold, today, and I walked to the gym early this morning with my wool coat thrown open, past the flower beds lining Silver Towers.  Here I saw, planted in great drifts, the beginnings of bulbs - green, mostly, sometimes tinged yellow at the tips, the way if you pinch the end of your finger, it will glow pink.

This has been one long winter for me - a winter of many seasons, even.  And now, suddenly, spring!  - I say, "suddenly," but of course these bulbs make no sudden moves.  They are all deliberate.  They have been busy, though silent and unseen these past six months - and, in fact, they began to work the moment they dropped their petals last spring, just when they seemed to fade into irrelevance (because who notices a plant out of season?).  Among gardeners, the more fastidious mind this mess of splayed green leaves, so graceless and jumbled; but it is important to resist the urge to clean up your flower beds by trimming these leaves, or twisting them into tight little bundles.  The bulbs are storing up nutrients for the next year; they are working, though you cannot, in late spring, possibly imagine the end point of their progress.  And then by fall they die back entirely; and if they're not quite forgotten, neither are these bulbs quite believed-in during the short days of November or January, when the wait til spring is long.  As late as early February, you may still mistrust them.  You may think, Maybe they did not survive this winter.  Maybe they sat in a patch of damp and rotted.  Maybe the squirrels ate them (as is always my luck with tulips).  Maybe they'll bloom; maybe they won't.  Maybe they're dormant and working hard.  Maybe they're just dead.

Now is the moment when everything suddenly swells - the camellia buds, the knobby black branches of the cherry blossom trees - but bulbs, I think, provide an especial pleasure, because each bulb contains within it the moment of returning-to, the appearance of something once loved that had gone away.