Spring Forward

Getting up in the morning is murder these days. Right after time change, Lexington skies stay dark until 7:30 a.m., longer if it’s overcast. For three weeks I’ve been hitting the snooze button, an annoying habit I can’t seem to shake. On weekends, my light sensitive brain usually brings me to reluctant consciousness before seven. Lately, I can sleep in blissful ignorance until eight or nine. Then Monday comes, and I’d swear it was two in the morning the way my body refuses to cooperate.

I can blame the time zone. Lexington is on the late side of Eastern Standard. We see dawn after everyone else. Overall, it's worth the dark mornings to be the last to see sunset as well. As days become noticeably longer, I smile in anticipation. I remember long, languid summer evenings when daylight lingers hours after the day’s heat.

In early March I spied a cat digging around in the new grass in the back yard. He turned sideways, and I realized the flattened, pudgy shape was not a cat at all. It was a groundhog, the first I’d ever seen. Why didn't he show up on February Second, his very own holiday? We could've thrown him a party! That would have been a memorable milestone of our first real winter.

Nevertheless, Craig and I are charmed by this unusual local wildlife, and named it Gordon. Gordon the groundhog.

When the plumber came to fix our icemaker, he was less impressed. "Your yard will get all torn up if you don't do something about the pregnant groundhog," he observed, laconically looking out our window as he installed a new faucet.

Oops. We just thought he was a pudge. Gordon became Gordina. We still see her partaking of tender new plants in our backyard, probably the ones high in Folic Acid.

Gordina is welcome to all the plants she wants, as long as they are weeds. Our grass is coming slowly back to life, but the weeds are beating it by a mile. We have each and every plant we resodded our California lawn to get rid of: dandelions, pursillane, baby tears, thistles, clover, and more I can’t name. In October, I observed a landscape maintenance crew strewing straw all over a lawn in my neighborhood. How odd, I thought, they are really going all out to decorate for Halloween. I later learned that this local custom protects a newly seeded lawn, trapping in moisture and preventing seed from washing away. We probably should’ve done that.

All through the winter, I gloried in the break from mowing the lawn. California lawns still need to be mowed all winter, albeit only bimonthly. We haven’t mowed our back yard since we moved in. In California, we could probably hide a car in the resulting overgrowth. Here, where yards grow dormant in the winter, we just have slightly scraggly grass.

A few weeks ago, a friend remarked that the tree border behind our back fence must be really pretty in the summer. "Yes, it must be," I agreed, laughing because it's my house and I have no idea how it will look in the summer. We are lucky to have trees that provide shade, a privacy barrier, and Kentucky fall colors. Best of all, they don't drop ten cubic yards of leaves every winter like the Liquid Amber tree we left behind. We just have to be vigilant for Poison Oak, another Kentucky native. I dread the red-and-yellow leaves, and the red, pimply skin rash that results from the slightest touch.

I'm looking forward to sitting on the back deck, an unheard-of luxury by California standards, in the glider I put together for Craig's birthday one year. I want to get more deck furniture, but I have to be mindful of the high winds that can accompany spring storms. Last week, a friend with a deck similar to ours looked out her back window to catch her barbecue grill in the act of walking itself down the stairs.

Yesterday the Bradford pear tree in our front yard exploded in delicate, white blossoms. One by one, trees around the neighborhood are doing the same. I just hope the exuberance doesn’t give way to a late freeze. Last April, a Lexington freeze killed delicate trees and plants that started to bloom and leaf out.

I even feel the coming of spring differently this year. I suppose I had to feel a real winter to truly appreciate it. The temperature shot past 65 degrees yesterday. It felt like the middle of summer to me. When I lived in California, I used to vacation in colder places, and marvel at the way Seattle residents wore flip flops and no coats in the pouring rain, or my Midwestern cousins gleefully ran around the yard in shorts in sixty degree weather. I wonder if I am going to turn into one of those people. I imagine myself wearing tank tops and short skirts when I go home in December, fanning myself on a sweltering sixty degree Christmas Eve.

In California, winter meant pansies in the front yard planters, and spring meant it was time to plant the marigolds that would last all summer. I don't know if either flower is well suited to the different climate zone, but I think its time for a change.

We've decided on petunias. The crinkly pinks and purples I see at the nursery would complement the red brick of our house. I wonder if they're good to eat. Not for me, of course, but Gordina needs her vitamins. Yesterday, we saw two fluffy bodies creeping through our back yard, so I guess we do have a Gordon the groundhog as well. I think I have a baby name book somewhere. We better start looking up names for the blessed event. I wonder how many groundhogs are in a litter. Do you call it a litter, or is it something else? At least we know what letter of the alphabet the names should be.