Field Days

"Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...strawberry fields."

It seems impossible that apple blossom season is over...every time we passed next door's Klackle's Orchard, we were swimming in the rapturous delight of so many white and pink plump and scented apple blooms, waving back at us with the promise of fat apples in the Fall.

My Grandpa and Grandma used to sing "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" to each other with misty eyes, remembering brief and bygone days of youth and courtship...I can never look at an apple tree all abloom without remembering their steadfast devotion...

This year the apple blossoms were gone too quickly for me. Our strawberries have consoled us in our loss, with their glossy show and starry little flowers.

Tom has been tending them assiduously since the first thaws of Spring, preparing new beds, dousing them with compost teas, and tenderly hand weeding around the plants. His skill has resulted in row upon row of smiling strawberry plants beaming up to the sky for all the world to see...

In the field the potatoes and peas are up...no matter how much we hill them up, the vigorous shoots of the potato tuber thrusts itself up into the May sunshine...to see this kind of determination in the field is encouraging...all of Spring seems to sing out: "We shall survive! We shall thrive! We shall delight!" and it is a welcome refrain after the trials and tribulations of a frost-filled early Spring.

"The world's favorite season is the Spring. All things seem possible in May"

The end of killing frosts has come, the greening days of early summer are around the corner...

and farmers breathe a little easier now, blessed with the benediction of gentle growing rains...they pause in cultivation, surveying the coming fruits of faith and toil...and leave their rakes and hoes for a moment to run the rows with bright-eyed barefoot 2 year old garden nymphs.