The season of Spring is approaching.  It is bittersweet.   The birds are singing this morning and the sunrise has hues of pink, orange and blue.  I stand at the window looking at the colors of the sunrise.  With Spring, comes my two favorite things: Easter and gardening.

Easter has always been my favorite holiday.  As a child, one of my favorite things to participate in was the annual church egg hunt.  At our church, the congregation put tons of eggs on the back perimeter of the church property.  All of us kids wanted to be the one to find the golden egg.  The golden egg was filled with chocolate and was also the biggest egg.  Another reason Easter is my favorite, is starting anew.  When the Spring temperatures come, there comes a new zest.  It is also time for to work in our garden.

When Matt and I married, we lived in an older farmhouse and the land was fertile.  I started planting a few peppers and tomatoes.  Everything starting to grow rapidly.  I kept planting.  I had no idea what I was doing.  I read books and websites and learned to garden.  Every year I say the garden won’t be too big, but every year it gets bigger.  Matt says our garden reminds him of the plant in the movie Little Shop of Horrors when the plant says “Feed Me Seymour!”  He says when I go to a garden store, the plants are calling out “Feed Me Robyn!” because the garden just keeps increasing each year.  Now that we have established ourselves here, we have five gardens and I love that our boys are an active part of my hobby.

My mother-in-law took this picture of the boys and I last year as my father-in-law and boys were working on one of the gardens.  This year, I was expecting Hope to join us as we tended our gardens.  Our routine is to load up the golf cart with everything we need and drive up to the field.  As we drive up to the gardens, the boys make me smile…sometimes they sing the song “Holiday Road” from National Lampoon’s Vacation.  At other times, they act like they are on Jimmy Fallon’s ride at Universal Studios-Race Through New York.

After arriving at the field, we then split up and do our tasks.  The boys usually play in the dirt,  start a game of tag and then come back to helping in the gardens.  At times when we are gardening, butterflies fly and we watch them go from place to place.    This year we will add to our garden in honor of Hope.  One idea is to put my butterfly stone that I have in the backyard in one of the gardens.  As the butterflies fly to and fro, this year we will take more time to ponder the beautiful butterflies.