“It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.
I was hunting among the spiraling vines that envelop my teepees of pole beans, lifting the dark-green leaves to find handfuls of pods, long and green, firm and furred with tender fuzz. I snapped them off where they hung in slender twosomes, bit into one, and tasted nothing but August, distilled into pure, crisp beaniness… By the time I finished searching through just one trellis, my basket was full. To go and empty it in the kitchen, I stepped between heavy squash vines and around tomato plants fallen under the weight of their fruit. They sprawled at the feet of the sunflowers, whose heads bowed with the weight of maturing seeds.”
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Reading the writing of Kimmerer is like walking directly in the summer. You can feel the day as she steps into her garden or out in the woods. The phrase “bit into one , and tasted nothing but August” says it all for me. It is why I garden, why I put my hands into the soil each spring pushing little seeds gently into a new home so they may stretch their roots deep in the soil and reach high in the air with their green stems.
The season of growing is coming. The ground is releasing the heavy frost of winter. The sun is lingering longer each day and allowing the air to warm, the plants to awake and the sleeping winter world as a whole to waking up.
I sit and stare at my raised beds, the black soil still stiff with frost. I watch the stalks of last years wild grasses leaning over after the winter snow and the branches of the Weigela sway in the March breeze waiting for the leaf buds to expand releasing small green leaves.
It is time. Spring is peaking out to greet us. I can feel it in my bones, in the ache of my fingers, in the warmth of the sun while sitting on the afternoon steps. While reading Kimmerer she reminds us of what is to come as the earth gives us her summer gifts.
Welcome spring time!
Words from JL 
This sounds like an interesting book – I’m just rounding up my gardening things, trying to think Spring. And your post is pushing me to think big!
This is a great book. Kennerer is Native American and a botanist. She brings both ways of seeing to her work. I am re reading right now.
I don’t have the patience for developing a true garden. I am a plop it in the ground and hope it takes root and grows. I admire you true gardeners.
I just get so excited when little green shoot come out of the ground and fresh veggies picked and eaten a few minutes later just can’t be beat! But I do understand the plop and go method of gardening.
thank god spring is here