It was sunny and 54 degrees here yesterday. We're all like bears coming out of hibernation. On the first nice day, everyone is outside. By 7:30 a.m. I was dressed and ready to go out to the garden (never mind that it was only 28 degrees—it warmed up pretty fast). The big garden over at the other house is still covered with snow, but the little garden I've been using for 15 years here by the house is all thawed out. Last year I made the husband promise that he would rebuild the beds for me this spring. They've been falling apart for a while now and I didn't think they would survive another season.

My job was to dig the dirt from around the edges of the beds and mound it in the middle so that the husband could take apart the edges and rebuild them. I like digging, and the beds are filled with wonderful bench loam from down in the valley. It is easy to dig up and turn. There were loads of gigantic earthworms. The husband made a few modifications to the beds along the way that will make it easier for me to keep the dirt where it is supposed to be. This garden is built on a bit of a slope, and one of the problems with the original beds was that the dirt tended to migrate from the upper to the lower beds. He used a different (much heavier!—we had to carry 25' long boards from one end of the property to the other!) kind of wood to edge the beds. Hopefully we won't have to do this again for another 20 years.

So all of the beds are ready for planting. I am trying to curb my impatience. The weather people keep telling us that this will be a long, cold spring, and that sunny, warm days will be few and far between. I am pretty sure, though, that I can put some lettuce and spinach in any time now, because one of the beds we dug up and rebuilt was where I had lettuce last year, and there were a few tiny little heads of red lettuce poking their way up. The herb/flower garden still has snow on it—snow which has hardened to the consistency of concrete. I thought briefly about digging the snow off the beds, but it would have been a Herculean effort. We'll just wait for it to go away naturally. I am sure the primroses are blooming underneath, though.

And there is rhubarb, right next to the strawberries that have ambitions to take over the world (any of my friends in Kalispell are welcome to strawberry starts—just let me know). Spring may be slow in getting here, but it can't stay away forever.

DD#1 has been home on spring break for the past week. She left on the train last night. She's got another 7 weeks of classes and then her first year of college will be over. How time flies!

The cold from hell finally went away, although my left ear is still stuffed up and that's very irritating to me. I've been taking decongestants. They help some, but I think I may need to get my hands on some first-generation Sudafed. That was the only stuff that ever worked for me.

I'm struggling with another knitting project. I will probably vent my frustrations about that in tomorrow's post. Stay tuned.