Okras and Carrots and Squash -- Oh My!

Seeds.
There is that brief span, one season held at arm's length from the next, when the only presence is the past.  The holiday season -- jump-started with Thanksgiving's over-nourishment and lit by Advent's progressive flames -- is such a vortex of attention that, once the New Year's ball has dropped at midnight and the Magi, unburdened of their gold and frankincense and myrrh, have departed for home by another way, a kind of retrospective melancholy settles in.  Only yesterday we finished packing away the shiny decorations and restored to the household its less festive, work-a-day charm.  Almost until that moment the focus remained on Christmas cards received, orphaned cookies and the redolent embers of strewn wrappings and hummed carols and family more tenderly endeared.  That, despite the subsequent celebration of two birthdays, a scattering of plans for the months ahead, and the significant melting away of snow.

And then suddenly, with the last box stowed away, the spell seemed broken.  There was morning and there was evening, the creation of a new day and all the possibilities it might have in store.

And garden seeds have begun to arrive in the mail.

Somewhere -- somehow -- in the midst of it all I hurriedly placed some orders.  Motivated less by anticipation than the fear that suppliers would exhaust the interesting part of their inventory and leave me with some cursory peas and common tomatoes, I forced some forward, but lackluster attention on hoped for varietals.  Confirmation emails released my attentions to the reveries at hand.  Until now.  The Christmas tree stored and the decorations packed away, coupled with the accumulating packets of seed, and my attentions are shifting in a new direction.

Seeds -- both literal and metaphorical -- are such a powerful stimulant, bearing in all their tiny and inauspicious simplicity the total essence of all they might become.  How many peppers could be the progeny of one such meager seed?  Or tomatoes?  How many leaves of spinach might emerge from just one of those tiny specks?
From a plane ticket purchased?
From a date confirmed?
From a reservation booked?
From a dream explored?
From a question asked?

It's a given, of course, that nothing could come of them -- not every seed sprouts -- but the possibilities build exponentially.

So I have begun today to map the garden -- that 60-foot by 60-foot earthen dreamspace in the back that will eventually receive those seeds.  And, with any luck, bear witness to all that can become of them...

...with a little space cleared, a tiny hole punctured, a bit of water sprinkled;

with the simple sowing...
...of a seed.