Dispatches from the Home Front: Barbara Wood's spring is sprung Dispatches from the Home Front: Barbara Wood's spring is sprung (April 20, 2005)

Spring is here -- my favorite time of year.

That first glorious flush of daffodils has come and gone and now the garden is seriously getting into gear, with trees blooming, roses in bud and sweet scents drifting from lilacs and jasmine.

I want to be outside, to feel the velvety skin of the fingertip-sized peaches that have appeared on my peach tree, to let the sun warm my back, to discover blooms of plants I don't remember ever seeing before, let alone planting.

But then, again, it's spring -- my least favorite time of year. Instead of having my hands in the dirt, I'm up to my elbows sorting rummage at the church. Instead of smelling sweet cut grass as I push my mower across what was a swamp a month ago, I am spending each afternoon in the school gymnasium as the eighth-grade class takes its turn at Woodside's traditional elementary school graduation ritual -- the operetta.

Instead of my usual early-morning run with the dog, where we are sure to spend some time gazing at what I think is my favorite horticultural sight in the whole world -- the roses blooming, blooming, blooming high in the trees and along the fences on Manuella Avenue -- I am going to be putting together baskets of flowers and notes for my daughter's teachers as part of a mandated "Teacher Appreciation Day."

Doesn't anyone understand how much more happily and fully I would have expressed my endless appreciation in January?

Instead of marveling at the perfection of a newly laid egg, its smooth, brown shell fitting into my cupped palm perfectly with its warmth matching my body temperature, I'll be over at the firehouse cracking eggs for a fundraiser pancake breakfast.

Instead of gently prying up and transplanting the new plants which miraculously generated from the twigs I stuck in the dirt in the fall, I'll be setting up the garden section of Woodside High School's auction fundraiser.

On May Day, when I'd really love to open my garden to the public so everyone could smell the roses and stroke the fennel and maybe chat with the chickens, I'll be dividing my attention between the operetta float and the History Committee entry after the 5K run.

Although, I must say, even though I complain about it, secretly I enjoy the three afternoons a week I have to wait while my daughter attends track practice too far from home for me to drive back and forth during the hour-and-a-half practice. I read novels and gardening magazines, and could probably find some nice gardens nearby if I looked.

And I'm looking forward to the wedding of my 50-year-old never-married cousin this month, and the christening of my nephew, Matthew, just born to my newest sister-in-law a year after a fertility doctor told her she could not possibly get pregnant. At nearly 9-1/2 pounds he was an awfully healthy first child for parents both past 40.

And I also just realized that if I just stand up from my desk, and look out my second story window, I can see, no exaggeration, a hundred roses blooming on a magnificent climbing rose trellised beneath the window.

So maybe, despite it all, it is really my favorite time of year. And next year, when my two oldest children are in college and my youngest is in high school, well, just think what a spring it will be!
Barbara Wood lives in Woodside in an old house filled with redheads and animals. Her column runs the third week of the month.

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