Aubergine: Punxsutawney Phil was wrong

I'm pretty sure I heard that the groundhog saw his shadow last week, but maybe his predictions only apply to the east and middle of the country, because here is is definitely spring. The pot of jonquils my mom brought us last spring, left in the pot but set aside and forgotten, have grown again and bloomed. We have poppies and rannuculus coming up in the big flowerbed, and a few tulips that we thought the gopher had eaten. If they are black when they bloom, then they are the ones M. brought us back from Amsterdam last year.

We went out this afternoon and pulled a bunch of weeds and mowed the lawn/weed lot, and suddenly the house looks tidy again. I havent wanted to invest any energy into the house lately, until I was more sure we were going forward with the purchase, but I'm starting to be in the mood again. We stopped at a couple of furniture stores while we were out this morning and talked about how we can move things around and replace different pieces of furniture to better coordinate and make our home a cozier, more beautiful nest. I've been looking for a particular dining table to replace the one we have, and as I sometimes do, I decided what I wanted before I knew if it even existed or not. So I've been looking for it for a while. But today, at Cost Plus, we found it. I'm very particular when I know exactly what I want, and sometimes I never find it. It is so great when I do.

One of the rearrangements we decided on last week was to move the computer table (messy, ugly, and not the style of our other furniture) down into the little add-on room, out of the corner of the dining room. My big spinning wheel was in the spot we wanted to move it to, but I never spin it anymore, it seems. I think I've used it 3 times int he 2.5 years we've been living in this house. But in our last house and the house before, it was in a corner with a window, and I loved that. So I decided to move it into the corner of the living room that we cleared out in December for the Christmas tree. There's a window in that corner, though it looks out into our front yard, which isn't the best view. But still, near a window, and that spot gets a sunbeam in the winter afternoons, which is a great bonus. Amazingly, as soon as I moved it there, I really wanted to spin for a while. Feng Shui at work? Was the problem just that it has always been in the wrong spot with the wrong energy in this house? I did spin for a bit, looking out the window, listening to some music, and it was wonderful. My fingers have not forgotten it at all, although I haven't practiced for a long time.

I felt this way when I first learned to spin, like I had done it before, though I was sure I had not. Was it some kind of genetic memory? Did women in my family spin until only a couple of generations ago? Probably, yes, though I don't have any evidence of it. This reminds me of my strong connection between daffodils and spring. When I see daffodils, I know the winter is receding. When I was little, my mom planted drifts of daffodil bulbs on the hilside above our house, and in the spring they came up all over. I thought that daffodils were wildflowers. They aren't here, but they seem so in Yorkshire, where my mom was born, and where they bloom in drifts across the dales and in every yard and roadway intersection in the early spring. The funny thing is, though, that my grandparents immigrated to the US, my mom was just a baby. She would have no memory of yellow-belled Yorkshire springs. Did her mother also try to recreate this piece of her homeland, so that my mother began to associate this flower with spring in their new home? Do we believe that spring will not come unless we have daffodils to mark the beginning? Immigrants, even generations later, carry their cultures with them in these small but significant ways.