[title subtitle=”words: Jessica Sowards”][/title]
I spend the winter craving the world to turn green again. By February, it is a fairly desperate situation. Every morning, I sit at the living room window overlooking my garden. There is more mud than anything in my view, and it has been months since it has been the source of beauty and comfort that it was in the summer.
When I lived in town, before embarking on the adventure of having a small hobby farm where we grow our own food, the seasons could be anticipated by what lined the Walmart shelves. And according to the Walmart shelves, in February I should be purchasing my bathing suit for the year and filling my cart with red and pink heart-shaped things for those I love.
My world is different now, and so is my February. February 14 is a muted affair in our home. On Valentine’s morning, I make the boys egg-in-the-hole toast but with a heart-shaped hole. Even though the days are still cold, it’s been long enough since the solstice for the days to be lengthening, so the hens start laying again just in time for our Valentine’s Day traditional breakfast. I give each boy a small box of chocolate and let them eat all five pieces at once, which makes me cringe, but it thrills them.
I’ve never cared much for Valentine’s Day, to be honest. I’m not much for grand gestures. Rather, I’ve always found the simple beauty of everyday romance to my liking. My husband Jeremiah knows this, so he brings me coffee with just the right amount of cream to the garden on summer mornings. He builds shelves in the greenhouse and hangs a planter box on the window of the chicken coop. These are the gestures that move my heart.
We’ve settled into the kind of romance that I never even knew to dream for, the kind with strong love and a comfort like wool socks on a cold morning. Love like that doesn’t find much expression on the aisles of Walmart, so Valentine’s Day for us means egg-in-the-heart-shaped-hole and the warmth of the home we’ve built together.
Then comes February 15. Oh, February 15! This day is circled on my calendar year after year. This is a day I long for, yearn for, dream of every day of winter. The frost moves in at the start of November. It kisses the garden with a roughness I resent and sends her away until spring. Every year, I know I will wake up the morning after frost and watch every zinnia and every sunflower turn black. Then I begin my wait for February 15.
February 15 is seed-starting day. It’s roughly six weeks before the average last frost date in my region, so it is the day I annually drag my seeds out and spread them across the kitchen table. I look through all the varieties of tomatoes and peppers and choose which ones will get space in my garden. Then I trek across the yard to my greenhouse and tuck the seeds into soil to start their lives. And just like that, the garden season is conceived.
February 15 isn’t a magic day or an exact science. It’s just the day I set for myself, the beginning of the end of winter. The first half of February may find me yearning at the window, aching for the gray world to turn green. The fourteenth of February may find me pressing a heart-shaped hole in bread for a holiday I really don’t understand. But the fifteenth finds me hopeful, rejuvenated and ready to start my year of growing food.
“We’ve settled into the kind of romance that I never even knew to dream for, the kind with strong love and a comfort like wool socks on a cold morning. Love like that doesn’t find much expression on the aisles of Walmart, so Valentine’s Day for us means egg-in-the-heart-shaped-hole and the warmth of the home we’ve built together. “
Then, every day after is one of wonder. I don’t know what it is exactly about it, but I think this may be the most wonder-filled time of the year. It doesn’t hold the harvest of summer or the fire of fall. It doesn’t hold the sparkle of Christmastime, but this is the season of hushed expectation.
There will be weeks before the threat of frost passes. We may have inches of snow to look forward to. There may be mornings when the trees look encased in glass. Nonetheless, the womb of the greenhouse will glow with warmth and light. My precious seeds will break beneath the soil, and their green sprouts will raise their arms to the sky. The goats’ bellies will swell while their kids roll beneath their tightly stretched skin.
Jeremiah and I will carry on in our everyday romance. We will break ground on a new garden and build a new greenhouse. We will aid the goats in birth and make no less than a hundred egg-in-the-hole toasts with regular old circular holes.
It will be a year full of beauty and bounty, but none of it will hold the special place in my heart that February fills.
To watch Jessica’s garden tours, visit her YouTube channel, Roots and Refuge.
