C'mon, Spring!

February has come and gone. Winter has been fairly mild this year, with only one serious snowfall and that was a mere 4 inches! The temperatures have dipped to single digits, but not below and not for long. We've not worn boots or parkas all that much, in fact. Maybe we'll pay for this in July and August, but for now we're okay with a mild winter!

With March here our thoughts are definitely aiming at spring. Those who are into gardening are anxious to get outside and start to do their activity. At Kendal at Granville, the outer perimeter of 6-8 feet around our cottage, villa, and apartment, is pretty much ours to do what we want in terms of landscaping and gardening. If we want to tend roses, mums, and daffodils, we can do that. If we want to plant corn and soybeans...well, not many of us do!

I'm not a gardener. I learned my lesson early when my father tried it and ended up providing a banquet for the squirrels and rabbits. I prefer to have a professional landscaper create a nice appearance to our cottage with creative and elegant plantings which are not expensive, require minimal maintenance, and don't appeal to the local wildlife. I'm a fan of hostas and day lilies and they look good outside our patio.

Speaking of patios, each cottage, villa, and apartment comes with one. Most are enclosed “three season rooms” and ours is a lovely, carpeted room, about 10 by 10 feet, which we can use whenever the outside temperature is above 50 F, with the help of a small space heater. The room is all glass on two sides, with three sliding doors that can be opened in warm weather (protected by screens), and it faces the woods in back of our cottage. It contains two lounge chairs, two rocking chairs, a bookshelf for my wife's library of knitting books, and a sewing cabinet with leaves that fold down. There's a lamp on the cabinet, an overhead lamp on the ceiling fan, a wall sconce, and her high-intensity lamp for knitting. It's our favorite place to sit and relax, enjoy happy hour or a meal, watch the birds in the trees, and see an occasional resident walk by on the paved path between our cottage and the woods.

We got a fleeting taste of the patio last week, after a long hiatus of not being able to use it since November. We had a warm Sunday and it was really nice to have one day when it was comfortable on the patio. The woods are still bare and the grass is still brown, but the sky was blue. This one day of warm weather, teasing though it was, was enough to revive our spirits in anticipation of a great spring season ahead!