"50 First Weeks"--Green Shoots and Where Will the Snow Go?

"50 First Weeks" again, a day late, but I seem to be losing track of time.  It's snowing again today, but the days are light so long, it seems only natural to work several more hours after dark, just like I was doing all winter.

So one "50 First Week" start-over that I should plan for this week is to get back into the habit of going to bed at night!

The biggest question with all the incredible piles of snow (celebrated in my previous post) is What's going to happen when it all melts? Melt it will, within a couple months, and that is a lot of water that needs to dissipate. Living as close to the edge as we do, every spring we see torrents of water gushing urgently seaward, carrying earth with it--we get a little closer to the edge every year.

Thinking about where all the snow will go reminds me of the question where all my emotional baggage will go. Some of it is held frozen, like the snowpack. And perhaps that's a good thing in a way--it's like a blanket, keeping my earth relatively warm. But it'll have to melt sometime, and then what?

My first response is to say that a very good piece of advice for writers is not to write about an emotional charge when you're too close to it to have perspective. So, I'm not going to write about some triggering events that happened over the past few days--I'll let them remain as snow and ice for now. Instead, I will release some "old snow," and talk about something that caught me several months ago, that I chose not to write about back then.

Last summer, I finally obtained a dehydrator after many years doing without. Because shipping to AK is so expensive, and because we were going to Oregon to Phil's mom last May, I had it shipped to her home in OR, with the plan of bringing it up here. Then, Phil and I between us spaced on letting Phil's mom know that I'd done that. When the dehydrator was delivered, she assumed it was a gift for her! Of course, we didn't want to disabuse her of the idea.

I'm eternally grateful that I didn't write about this at the time. I was so unmagnanimous and ungenerous. I was so upset and self-centered! All I could think was how I'd saved for that quite expensive dehydrator, how there were already several (less good, though) dryers at the farm, how I couldn't afford to buy two...poor poor pitiful me...

As it turns out, I chose to make it so I could afford to buy a second one for us (which was just a matter of taking on a little extra editing), and found a better way to get it shipped up to AK. As it turns out, Phil's mom, in her late 80's, still does so much home preservation, and she liked that dehydrator so much, she ended up buying a second one just like it, and she wouldn't have known about Excaliburs without that having happened. It was really the best possible gift for her.

I still feel ashamed of my initial reaction to the miscommunication, and so glad I didn't write about it at the time. In retrospect, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to experience abundance and sharing.

That's some good snow to have melted!

Meanwhile, as snow falls outside today, the photo at the top of this post shows a green shoot! I am so excited and surprised by this one. It's an unlikely story--I couldn't have made this up. I brought some turmeric root back from England--we were there in November 2010, so well over a year ago. I ate most of it fairly quickly, but one root got covered up in our hanging basket and hung out there for most of a year. When I found it, it had a sprout, so I decided to plant it and see what would happen.

For a few months, the results were depressing. The pot sat right in front of one of my work spaces; the shoot shriveled and shrunk. It appeared I'd killed the root by planting it! Still, I watered sporadically, hopefully. I never quite got around to tossing it out. And now look at that beautiful green furled flagpole! The original sprout seems to be coming back too.

I just love this, and not only because I love turmeric so much, or because it came all the way from my favorite Asian market near my parents' home in England, a year and a quarter ago!

Are you seeing green shoots where you are? What snow have you let melt lately?
Happy Spring!