A Year at the Garden

# Chapter 1: The First Warm Day

The ground smells different in March.

Not warmer, exactly. Sharper. Like the soil has been holding its breath under frost for three months and has finally decided to exhale. I have been kneeling in this garden long enough to know the difference between cold-that-means-it and cold-that-is-finishing, and this morning's cold is finishing. My knees disagree with the assessment, but my knees disagree with most of my decisions and have for years.

Dawn is still an hour off. The sky over the eastern ridge is a color I am not going to name, because naming it would turn it into something smaller than it is — something in a painter's catalogue instead of the actual sky doing whatever the sky does on the first warm day of the year. I pull the coat tighter at the collar and step off the porch.

Bramble follows.

She takes the steps slower than she used to. Three years ago she would have cleared them in a single fluid motion — that boneless drop she does, all muscle and indignation. Now she takes them one at a time, and there is a pause at the middle step that was not there last autumn. Her muzzle is greyer than it was at midwinter. The threading is visible even in this light, silver-white along the jaw and creeping toward the base of those ridiculous ears. She does not seem to care about this. She cares about the mouse she can hear under the woodpile, and about whether I am going somewhere interesting, and about the cold stone under her feet.