I don’t really know why we are beginning our spring yard clean-up in January other than the fact that my husband likes to get a jump start on all our neighbors, really all people with yards.
We have had lots of rain, some snow, ice and lots of wet days and miserable weather during the month of January and all the grasses are brown, flower beds are asleep, trees are bare and stripped of all leaves, and our ground is squishy as a sponge. I keep a very good count of the days until spring and every time Roy talks about the starkness of the hills and hollers on our farm, I say it’s 117 days till spring or ever how many days is left in the dreary bleak winter.
Yesterday he “spring cleaned” our yard in town and as he raked the debris out of my flower and shrub beds, he found two-inch jonquils sprouting from the cold wet ground. Jonquils and daffodils!! Ground cover of vinca was tainting the dirt green and my wild violets are breaking through the sodden ground. It can’t be that long until “spring has sprung”.
I am always reminded of my grandmother’s house as spring pushed away at the cold to enter our time. It would seem to me, being so young that I would go to sleep one night in her little bedroom tucked in next to her and my grandaddy’s room and all was dreary and dull in her brown yard and wake up to daffodils waving their little yellow heads and bobbing in the winds of mid-February. It seemed like a magical time to a little girl.
She had an ever-running freshwater creek down the hill from her old house and before their deep well was dug, she and everyone else would carry buckets of thar ice cold water from the creek to the house. And, at this early time of the year you would sometimes have to break the thin ice from the top to fill a bucket from the flowing water. I always had to go into the woods at the first glimpse of spring and taste the water from that clean, crisp refreshing running water. And of course, I had to check the persimmon tree that grew on the bank. It was always much too early for the fruit to bear but the fruit was already set into the sprouts of the tree.
Spring is a miracle every year that the season changes but if you are or were blessed to have lived on a farm or had kinfolks who did, you know what I mean when I say, “Spring is the fresh beginning of all things new.” And as of today, January 31st we are exactly sixteen weeks and five days away from spring.
Blueberry Lemon Pound Cake
1 box of lemon cake mix, 1 box of lemon instant pudding mix, 4 eggs, ¾ cup of vegetable oil, ½ cup of sour cream, 1 ½ cups of frozen or fresh blueberries, juice from 2 lemons plus the zest, at least 1 big tablespoon of lemon zest or more.
Mix all the dry ingredients first and be sure to coat the blueberries in the dry mix to keep them from sinking to the bottom. Add remaining ingredients except the blueberries and fold them in easily at the end. Pour into a Bundt or tube pan and bake 350 degrees for one hour.
