Today, the day of the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, I sit surrounded by gardening catalogs. They started coming in the mail last week, and now gorgeous pictures of ripe tomatoes and a drawing of a tee-pee full of beans and blossoms are on my lap.
There is something so hopeful about the act of winter garden planning. Outside, my tomato plants from last season still stand in their cages all brown and withered. The grass has stopped growing, and my perennial flowers sport dead puffs of seeds. And yet, in the midst of all this winter, I am thinking of spring. I am imagining the taste of yellow pear tomatoes and debating how many hot and how many sweet peppers I will want.
It is something essentially optimistic about the gardener's certainty that winter will end, that darkness will be replaced by days of almost endless sun, and that warm soil will be ready for planting. We dream of tomatoes, believing that the world won't end; the sun will not go supernova; nuclear war won't annihilate everyone. Spring will come, just as it did last year, just as it always has. Humans will be the same lovers of tomatoes that we have been for years.
It makes me think of Easter, which is weird at Christmas time. I think of the resurrection myth and of the belief that, after dark times and grief, warmth and happiness will return. I think of Anne Shirley and the night she realized she loved Gilbert and that he may die; when she knows that he will live, she quotes Psalm 30, "Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning." I think of Boethius's wheel and his certainty that bad fortune will give way to good, turning through cycles, just like the seasons.
And here I sit, acting out the human hope for resurrection and rebirth and a change for the better in our fortunes, with my seed catalogs.
