Spring again.

I can feel it. I can smell it. The house wrens and bluebirds are congregating on the birdfeeders in front of my windows. The tips of Bradford pears and redbuds have taken on a pinkish pregnancy. The grass has begun to prickle. The dirt has begun to darken. The robin redbreasts are too fat to fly and wobble from worm to worm. The evening is longer and winking.

Last night, while the air was still cold, I felt the urge to begin starting my seeds. I grabbed a red mixing bowl, a wooden spoon, and a measuring cup full of tepid water, three paper packets of tiny, furry tomato seeds - Cosuvolto, Persimmon, Camper's Joy, Beefsteak, and Black Krim - several stacks of peat pot planters, and a large bag of potting soil. I dumped soil into the mixing bowl and added water, letting Fain stir it to make a mud pie batter. Then we added the soil to our planters with our hands. Fain threw some but ceased and desisted with a mild rebuke and turned his attention to the moldering hay bale left over from Halloween, running to leap on it and fall off, a favorite pasttime of his. While he played king of the hill, I poked holes in the soil with the poking end of the wooden spoon and then dropped two seeds into each, carefully covering the seeds, imagining their gratitude for enveloping them in rich, damp, warm soil, away from the still cool nakedness of the world. I wrote their names on multi-colored straws that I found in a kitchen drawer and stuck them into the little pots. Lacking a greenhouse or suitable space, I lined a living room window's sills with the brown pots of expectancy. I warned Fain to "look but not touch" and promised him that we would take turns feeding the little baby seeds until, as he said, "They get big like us." Well, let's hope not quite that big.

Needless to say, considering that I have nearly fifty individual pots already planted and still ten or so packets of seeds to go, I'll have far more plants than I can accomodate in the small plot of earth that I've dug up outside of my kitchen door. Even if I had more room, there wouldn't be much sense in planting all of these tomatoes. Fain and I could never eat them all. So with a spirit of entrepreneurship, I've decided to have a plant sale in April, when my little seedlings are mature and ready to leave home. Maybe I'll also set up a lemonade stand for Fain. Anything seems possible and promising with spring so close.