Each morning, I’ve been glancing at the progress of the spring flowers in my garden, coming up from bulbs.  Only the snowdrops are blooming so far, but the others are putting up their leaves.  I admire the way they push up right through the autumn-leaf mulch, no matter how thick it is or how firmly it’s been packed down by the months of snow and rain.

Today, I saw that one of the tulips also is contending with a plastic-foam packing peanut that blew into our yard.  That shouldn’t be there!  The poor plant has no natural expectation of encountering such a thing!  Nevertheless, she persisted and has simply skewered the intruder with one pointy leaf and gone on reaching toward the sun.

(The bright red and yellow objects in the upper left are not trash, but petals that dropped off a flower arrangement from church that we recycled as a dining-table centerpiece.  My 5-year-old scattered the stray petals in our yard “to brighten it up” while we wait for our local flowers to bloom.)

All of us living on this Earth are fighting our way through the plastic garbage.  So far, most of us are able to get by–but now is the cool of the day.  We’ve got to put the brakes on our trashing of the planet before it gets so bad that we can’t reach the surface anymore!!

What did you give up for Lent?  It’s not too late to start!  What could you do without, use less, or replace with something sustainable, in favor of a future where we still have flowers?

This is a great time of year for striving to do better, because it’s a time when we can see progress and hope all around us.  My grandmother wrote this poem about spring bulbs 78 years ago, when the world was burning with war yet she still hoped to have a child and feared she never could.  And now her little great-granddaughter is watching the bulbs come up and exclaiming over their beautiful persistence!

There’s still hope for our Earth.  Let’s keep it alive.

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P.S. Our first crocus opened the day after I wrote this.