How Can You Tell When Spring has Sprung?

Sometimes, you have to look beyond the weather. Right now, Houston is gloomy, cold and very wet. However, I am officially on Spring Break and therefore, it must be spring! Also, yesterday I received my first delivery of farm-to-table produce. I have been wanting to sign up for one of these services for a long time and another teacher just told me about a local company that she's been happily using.

There were two options, weekly or every other week, and I chose the twice monthly plan. The fruits and veggies (mostly veggies) are locally and organically grown and I had the option to make substitutions for anything I didn't want. With a quick email, I was able to substitute kale for collard greens.

I am my father's daughter. I have watched him agonize over the selection of the perfect peach at a local market, and I have seen him savor the sweetness of a ripe tomato as if he were eating Godiva chocolate. Dad, you would have loved the sight of all of these farm fresh veggies waiting on my doorstep. This week's bounty included kale, tomatoes, artichokes, spring onions, beets, arugula, spinach, oregano, mushrooms and bokchoy.  So, even though the weather is crummy, I am thinking that spring must be in the air.
I stayed in today and made a chicken soup using many of the ingredients from yesterday's delivery.

a  bowl of spring yumminess

I used the oregano, bokchoy, mushrooms and onions. I added chicken broth, 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a package of shelled edamame and diced carrots.

I hope that wherever you are today, you are beginning to feel the rumblings of spring. You are beginning to think of newness and freshness and beauty. Passover and Easter remind us of this season's symbolic meaning. It is a time to savor the new. New love, fresh starts, blooming flowers and bountiful produce.
It is the season that means that winter is over and summer is near.
Robert Frost's poem, "Blue-Butterfly Day" captures some of that feeling.


It is a blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these-sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.


But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

Enjoy all your "blue-butterfly days," and let the world show you its majesty and mystery as spring springs forth right before your eyes.