By Katy Burns
It happens every year – the inevitable march of the seasons. We usually take it for granted, without a sense of wonder.
We have winter, winter, and more winter, day after day. Leafless trees against the pale sky. Layers of fluffy white stuff on the ground and on the gracefully bent branches of hemlocks – at least if we we’re lucky and have snow.
Otherwise, it’s just seemingly endless months of flattened brown grass, shrubs that look like piles of dead sticks and the collapsed remnants of once flourishing daylilies and other stalwart perennials.
Walkers move briskly along the road, bundled up in heavy coats, scarves, mittens – and often, this past year, haunted by the lethal coronavirus, avoiding contact with others. All the New England world is illuminated by that flat, distant light of winter – lovely but pale and chilly.
Then – just about the time when we’d OD’d on reruns of “Law and Order UK” and alphabetizing the spice rack was beginning to look like a good idea – there popped up, along the front walk, little white flowers that weren’t visible two days ago, before a strip of snow melted.
Snowdrops! Or if you’d prefer formality, Galanthusnivalis, also known as the common snowdrop, although there’s nothing common about snowdrops, bursting from the ground in March. Tiny miracles, really.
They’re soon to be joined by other charming bulbs, culminating in displays of glorious daffodils, blooming their cheerful yellow heads off. In my opinion, the person who doesn’t love daffodils doesn’t have a heart. And certainly cannot fully appreciate the reappearance of…
…SPRING!
Yes, spring is here, at long last. Well, technically it was yesterday, March 20, officially Spring Equinox 2021, according to my calendar, but who wants to quibble? It is now spring, which – we all devoutly hope – signals not only a season of warmth and regrowth but the beginning of the end of a particularly gruesome year.
Those little bulbs – which wouldn’t even be noticeable among summer’s gaudy horticultural splendor – signal for me (and I’d like to think for others) a time of fragile but real hope after a year of fear, of hiding from life. And the sunlight is, seemingly suddenly, warm and inviting.
For so many of us, particularly those of us who are of a certain age, the last year has been horrific as our world shrank. At first, if we thought of it at all, we thought the new coronavirus, COVID-19, was a nasty piece of work, but surely it would swiftly be over.
But as we retreated into our homes and waited for it to be over, we readjusted our lives. And it wasn’t swiftly over, not by a long shot. I don’t think most of us realized, a year ago, how much our lives would change.
We abandoned, those of us who could, our workplaces. Those of us who no longer had workplaces more and more hunkered down in our homes, our self-imposed isolation broken mostly by weekly trips to a grocery store, shopping lists in hand and masks securely in place.
What fun, after all, was a leisurely ride along the Connecticut River or up the Maine coast when we had to pack a lunch because restaurants were shuttered – or we were afraid to patronize those that weren’t closed?
More and more, Zoom, FaceTime, Skype and their ilk became our portals to life outside our individual cocoons – and they are modern miracles that have made the solitary life more livable – but they are no substitute for flesh-and-blood get-togethers.
Now, a year after the coronavirus took root here, we are by no means at the end of our confinement – that cannot be stressed enough – but we are, many of us think, at least at the beginning of the end of our national ordeal.
And that’s why the appearance of those snowdrops – almost insignificant in a normal year – seems to offer a glimpse of a better future.
That’s a lot of meaning to read into a cluster of small, white flowers blooming under the melting snow. But this year – after the last horrific one – gives them extra meaning.
They mean hope. And now we really, really need hope.
I thought of the snowdrops when I read of a staple of British television. “Gardener’s World” is a long-running show – an institution, really – on British TV and, in its 58th season, it’s beginning to find an audience in this country. It’s described as a gentle look at the rhythm and regularity of a loved, well-tended garden over one season.
During this pandemic, it has gone “from being comfort TV to indispensable viewing,” New York Times writer Steven Kurutz says, and he quotes the show’s current host, Monty Don:
“Gardens can’t make our problems go away, they can’t solve them, but they can help us to deal with them. I’m old enough to know that if you have grief, if you have suffering, if you have loss, the garden is a solace.”
Starting, of course, with snowdrops.
(Monitor columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)