Flowering

As I drove to Quilt Artist's house the other night, I noticed that the tall snowbanks in her city neighborhood were gone, completely melted, leaving the grey sidewalks bare. The city is always just a bit warmer than the rural area where I live, and as I pulled into her driveway, I saw green along the edge and clusters of white flowers near to the ground. Snowdrops! The first blooms of spring.

It felt like spring as Signing Woman and I pulled chairs up to the table to eat the food that Quilt Artist had prepared: noodles with sauce, new asparagus, roasted potatoes. A big bunch of yellow daffodils burst from a vase above the muted colours of her tablecloth. The daffodils came from the store and not her garden, but soon spring plants will begin flowering in gardens throughout Snowstorm Region, replacing the greys and browns of early spring with soft greens and brilliant colours. Quilt Artist talked about her plans for her flower garden, the one directly behind the house. We are all eager for the warm weather to get here so we can spend time with our hands in the dirt.

We re-hashed the events of the winter and caught with all that was happening with our families. Quilt Artist talked about the art shows her quilts will be in this summer. Signing Woman is looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild this August. The end of a March is a wonderful time: the winter behind us, we are looking forward to the cool sunny days of spring, and then the warmer, lazy days of summer. We got quite silly as we talked about the pajama party we had in February and made plans for the next big gathering. Some of the husbands in this group of friends refer to us as the "Wild Women" and we always feel obligated to live up to that name, although really our gatherings mostly consist of eating and talking and dancing.

"But it's nice to have friends with whom you can play the air guitar," Quilt Artist said.

The walls of her house are filled with quilts. I love artwork that can be touched (I am always getting yelled at in museums for touching things). Woven into the quilts are the images from nature: pebbles, tree branches, rivers, leaves, sunlight. After dinner, Quilt Artist showed Signing Woman and me a quilt she was working on. The colours of the quilts often reflect the seasons, and the quilt she showed us, draping it over the banister of the staircase, burst with the blues and greens and soft colours of spring.