The feeling of Spring is definitely in the air. It is also in the attitudes and faces of the people I meet. The winter of 2009-2010 has been an especially long and dreary one. Months of gray skies, cold rain, snowstorms and frigid temperatures have made everyone a bit weary and gloomy. Even though Autumn is usually my favorite season, this year I’m really feeling the rush of anticipation for the sight of crocus and daffodils and tulips.

There is something about the onset of Spring that seems to infect women with the desire to start a garden. Nearly every woman I know has said she is anxious to get out and dig in the dirt. She wants to plant flowers and vegetables and feel that connection to nature and the sun that she has been deprived of for so many months.

I am reminded of my mother who so loved planting bright annuals and cultivating perennials that would give her pleasure all summer long, year after year. For as long as my grandmother was alive, my mother would go to her house on the Saturday before Mother’s Day and plant grandmother’s favorite flowers in the various planter boxes and containers around the windows and on the porch. It was a ritual that gave both of them a great deal of pleasure.

While I did not inherit that love of gardening, it does seem to me that it is shared by most of the women I know. I feel that I am lacking that particular expression of femininity.  But I am grateful to the members of the sisterhood who do love to garden because I love the results of their labor.