Grey dampish winters that melt into spring...

I was out and about in the car last night at 5:15 p.m. -- and I realized that it was still light enough to read street signs. Last week at 5:15 (when I was out as well) it had not been. Spring is coming.

There is a bounce to our steps, a little more energy to just get done the things that need doing. Maybe it's the increased light, maybe it's the exercise. (The whole household has gotten on schedule -- all different schedules, with the working women going before dawn, we stay-at-homes going before school pick-up, and the children going to after school sports activities). Whatever the cause, it feels Good.

Not that anything has been done on the house for a while. HomoDomi has been elbow deep in PTA stuff, and is looking forward to the end of his presidency in June with desperation, relief and some sadness, perhaps. However, today he put paint to brush and began coloring the dining room wall again, so soon I may have something to blog about that.

I have been planning the garden. Part of the plan to lay the new brick pathway around the side of the house includes developing a 6 x 20 foot stretch of fallow ground into a border garden (between the path and the house). To call it "fallow ground" implies something grander than it is, which is a strip of grass next to a strip of bare mud, which had been under the old concrete walkway. It is on the north west corner of the house, and -- in full summer only -- sunlight reaches only a part of the area, and for only a few hours in the late afternoon. The new stair-railing will block even more light.

Luckily, White Flower Farm has a Shady Lane Garden Plan , and that's what I'm going with. The idea of just buying their plan seems mundane, wrong, but I have never had much success with planning heights and flowering seasons of gardens. I place my faith with the experts, and trust the end result to look something like the catalog photo, and certainly better than what's there now (which is pictured, in part, below). Of course, several other plants are dropping into my shopping cart as I study the catalog (in paper and online), so I hope to upgrade other corners of our garden as well. Fragrant lilies! A night garden! Mixed pink, red and orange poppies! My eyes are bigger than my acreage.

Last fall I took advantage of a bulb sale and planted about 80 bulbs around the house -- a mixture of tulips, anemones, snowdrops and crocuses. I can't remember where they all went, or even what they are. Today during a lull in the rain, when the sky was brighter (if not exactly "sunlit") I found the snowdrops have bloomed. But otherwise it's pretty bare, still.