Mixed Messages

Dear Diary,

It snow pretty much all day yesterday although it didn't seem to stick until later in the day.  At that, it is a mere dusting compared to what fell south of here.  But looking out this morning I really saw a mixed message.  My poor daffodils are trying so hard to trumpet their message of spring while old man winter is whispering, "Not so fast!"  April can be the cruelest month.

I will disregard the "old man's" side of the conversation and concentrate on the little daff's more hopeful message.  Greg is coming to start a few small projects that need finishing from the fall and I will chart out our course to prepare for the spring gardening season.  It will get here eventually and it will arrive, as it always does, all at once, with a crash, boom, bang!  The quiet inward looking days of winter are over.  Now we look out and prepare to fully engage with the landscape again.

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March."
-  Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time, 1926