It is my first day in the garden and I am on my knees digging through layers of leaves over buds that have broken through late winter earth. Thoughts that bounce through my head with no rhythm or rhyme pour out into the dirt and my mind becomes still like a lake on a windless morning. I clip the overgrown tendrils off of roses and rampant honeysuckle. I rake and load the pruned vines and piles of brittle leaves onto a trailer only to bend over those buds again and repeat my moving meditation. After two hours I am spent but when I stand up again my shoulders, which were three inches higher when I began, have lowered in ease and my breathing is deep and full.

As the March breeze brushes my flushed cheeks a memory ripples the placid waters within and a smile comes that relaxes every muscle of my face. I am four years old and wandering in a neighbor's yard where deep purple tulips beckon to be plucked. My mother is aghast when I present her with Mr. Wilke's rare blooms that he has slaved over. It is the tone and not the words that cause my first fib to follow when my mother asks me where I got them.

"Alice was cleaning her house and found these behind her couch so she gave them to me to give to you," I answered and my innocent head becomes clouded as fact and fiction blur.

The memory fades but the child stays and we hold hands while gazing out onto the open acres in anticipation of what will come. We can almost smell the honeysuckle sweet scent that wraps around the old cedar fence and see the peonies that form clusters of delight in the garden by the river. It will be the roses, however, that are this child's favorite. They remind her of the bush that blossomed by her back porch which were ruby like her mother's lips. She remembers the thorns that drew blood and dulled her temptation to pick them so she could drink their beauty on parched summer days long after spring's flourish had stilled.