We Begin

Today, March 1, 2010, I become a blogger. I do this in memory of what for me is the first day of Spring, at least a sort of Spring.

For today I entered into my backyard and began pruning - potentially out-of-season - a large grape vine curling around a post to the left of my little back porch. I am experimenting. Last year I began pruning in mid-April and this was too late. Sap was running and it left small pools of wounded goodness all over the damp ground, pools caused by me and my own clumsiness.

So this year I am beginning anew, as gardeners get to do. I have cut one vine to see if March 1 is too early to prune, and I have left the others - six or seven of them - deliberately alone. Here they will be permitted to flow into the sky at their own speed and interest. Only one has been pruned on March 1, 2010, and that is enough. For me, it is a beginning, a time to see, a time to just let other things go whilst I explore what is possible and what the possible is made of.

And so, we begin.