~I won't know until I try it.~

It was nice to hear Mike's voice as he yelled out the words to me over the weekend.

"Hey come out here!  We've got some Spring!"
And sure enough he was right.  We did.

Funny how the sight of tulips popping out of the ground, so slightly that you had to be looking for them to be able to see them, could make a day in late winter seem so much brighter.  Yet they most certainly did.  This past fall, about a month before the really hard freezes began here along the Western Slopes, I planted a series of about 48 of them into the soil of a new flower bed.  We had been having an ongoing battle with a renegade band of ground squirrels only a few weeks before and I wasn't even sure that the hearty bulbs would remain in the ground long enough to make it.  

But they did and I was surely glad.

             October of 2014 on a very sunny Saturday afternoon in the Rockies.

                           Five months later on a late winter day in mid March.

You know, as I have grown older it seems as though it's the littlest of things that make me happy.  I don't need a lot of money, a swimming pool in my backyard or trips to exotic places.  I just need flowers to grow when I put their bulbs or seed into the ground and when they don't grow, then I become frustrated.  I have learned a lot about this thing they refer to as "patience" and the greatest lesson I've acquired is that I have very little of it some days.  I'd like to say that I am getting better at it and perhaps it would be true to say that I am.

Or maybe not.

Soon it will be time to start on item #10 on my list of 60 things to do before I turn 60 later on this year.  "Convince zinnias to grow from seed here in the clay-filled soil of south western Colorado."

I've struggled like crazy with this ever since I moved here, now nearly two summers ago after Mike and I got married in May of 2013.  I had lots of favorite flowers that I loved to grow back in Kansas and zinnias (pronounced ZEE-NEES by my mom and my Grandmother Brown) were among the ones that I enjoyed the most.  Every summer back there, for more than I can remember to count, I grew them and I didn't grow just a few.  

I grew a lot!

They could be found everywhere in my backyard and along the sides of my old house back there on 14th Street.  I chose the different varieties that appealed to me, mostly for their colors and not necessarily for their individual types.  You can't imagine how many different ones there are to choose from until you pick up a seed catalogue in the dead of winter while you are "dreaming" of springtime.  It was easy for me to come up with a $50 order for zinnia seed in no time at all, especially when snow drifts lay against the entire world outside of my front door.  I never did mind writing out that check because sending off an order to the J. H. Shumway company reminded me that winter's fury and the cold that came with it could not last forever.

It only thought that it could.

Last year I nearly gave up on zinnias.  Absolutely nothing was working out for me with the planting of them.  I thought it was starting to look hopeless, as if I would be forever and perpetually wasting money on seed.  The disappointment of seeing little plants push up through the soil and then promptly die a few days later was getting to be more than I wanted to bear.  Mike sensed my sadness and one day brought home several of them, already started, from the local greenhouse.  We enjoyed looking at them all summer long as they sat in an old flowerpot on the front porch of our house here.  They were nice to have but still one thing was wrong.

It wasn't me who had grown them.

I have a special stash of zinnia seeds this year and by early April I will make that attempt to start them inside the house for a change, rather than placing them directly into the soil outdoors.  We have some good light that comes in from the sunroom windows and if Crosby the cat doesn't decide to check them out first, perhaps we will see some life start to spring forth.  Maybe they will make it.  Maybe not.  One thing is for sure.

I won't know unless I try it.

My very first attempt ever to grow something from seed here.  April of 2013, the month before Mike and I got married back home in Kansas.  I was planting sunflower seeds, about a gazillion of them, just south of the house here.  So many seeds were sown that day.  I believe a grand total of seven sunflowers made it.