The Promise of Spring In November

The secret is - bulbs.  This small patch of bare earth and dead leaves now looks desolate and uninviting.  Yet it is one of the places in my yard that holds the secret promise of Spring inside its heart.  I planted about 100 bulbs about the yard.  As I planted on a sunny but raw and windy day, I thought about the hopefulness of planting bulbs, the belief in the future, in the cycle of life and return of warmth and color. 

Those bulbs, those small brown packages of hope.  They look dead.  All boxed up in dusty packages on clearance racks of large monocultured chain stores, underneath florescent lights, with bits of themselves flaking off like a bag of onions in the grocery store.  The bulbs are on clearance racks this time of year because the chain stores are eliminating the outdoor gardening sections to make way for Christmas.  The population's attention has shifted, again.  But, it's not really past the season to plant bulbs quite yet. 

And, there they sat, the silent promises of beauty and scent, of rebirth and rejuvenation, nearly religious chalices, all but ready to be tossed aside.  I reclaimed a few packages, knelt in the wind, dug through dead debris and cold earth for hours.  I measured the correct depth for each type of bulb, and laid each in its rightful place.  And smiled.  What better ritual for accepting oncoming Winter and the loss of daylight savings time?