Over the past few years I have learned to love these small tulips almost more than the the tall showy ones. Known as species tulips, they are among the oldest of the tulip varieties, and much hardier than than the hybrid ones. Year after year they return, thriving in poor soil or rich. Early in the morning the blooms are closed up tight, but by the middle of a sunny afternoon they have opened like stars. 

And this is bloodroot, finally beginning to naturalize. This year it is spreading throughout the bed, among the ramps that are also spreading, and the effect is so beautiful. Once, in a long-ago March, I saw a field, an actual field, of crocuses in bloom at Kew in London. Ever since, that has been my dream of beauty . . . a field of spring ephemerals trembling in the new air.

***

Today my weekly housework chores await, as does that endless editing, and I need to convince myself to deal with class plans for next week, and I need to prep for Saturday's festival presentation, and I'm itching to mess with some notebook scratchings, and also a cubic yard of garden soil will be dumped onto my driveway at some point today, and thus, as you might guess, this will be a day when something on that list will surely not get done. Already temperatures are in the mid-40s, destined to rise into the 60s. I expect I will have a hard time staying in the house, but I will try.

I'm still reading E. B. White's essays, still working my way through The Wings of the Dove. The cat is still snuffling with his cold, and I am still snuffling with spring allergies, and neither of us slept well last night, so we will both enjoy the sunshine. Now that he's an old fellow he doesn't stray far from my side. I'm sure we are a comical pair, strolling slowly together through our minuscule domain.

Ah, take your loves where you can find them . . . old cat, new blossoms, the tremble of unwritten poems, a cup of tea warming cold hands, the scratch of responsibility, a freshly washed floor, six workshirts fluttering on a clothesline, the unsaid, the murmur, the awkward song--