The January Garden // 2023
Truth be told I have not spent very much of January in the garden. I’ve caught snippets of sunshine, taken snapshots here and there, but I’ve been indoors most of all.
January began with the ending of the holiday season and my 28th birthday. It was also the most calm I’d ever walked into the New Year. I didn’t feel any big way about it and didn’t feel any grandstanding pressure to make changes, start anew, or begin fresh. I feel as though I’ve been on a pretty big course for change since I had my firstborn in 2020, my second in 2022, and since I gave up Instagram last summer.
I’m on a good course. God is with me.❤
I know I’ll get to the end of this year and see more of what He’s done in me and around me. If I walk with God every day I will have done the most important thing. In that communion with Christ I will grow and even feel the freedom to be still and to just enjoy. It won’t be “A Whole New Me,” it will be me, WHOLE.💖
After the New Year and birthday celebrations came the getting back into life routines and working hard to meet a pretty big and exciting deadline. I’m thankful for this season in which the garden all but sleeps, and I stay under blankets resting, reading, dreaming, planning, and concentrating my efforts on making good soups, party planning for Valentines, the spring, and beyond, and most of all—completing those big writing projects I won’t have as much time (or patience) for in the spring or summer.
Still there are flowers that bloom in the January garden.
The beauty is sparse, but it’s there. And I wonder what it might be like to bloom before everything feels put to right in the spring and falls into place for the season. It seems like a lonely time.
This is naive thinking, because these flowers are just fine. They are better than fine. They are thriving. It was always going to be winter for them and they were always going to love blooming right in the depth of it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, don’t you think?☺
Any flower blooming in winter is a reminder of what’s to come, but also an anthem of the life already here.
In the height of spring doesn’t it sometimes feel like life gets lost in the shuffle? But when it’s winter and there is only some bloom, you savor every ounce of it. That’s the gift of winter—the pausing and savoring of life wherever it is staring you in the face, loud and clear.
I think February will find the garden much the same except for these daisies will quite possibly burst in great numbers. I may spot my first buttercup of the season and there will more than likely be new growth on many of my roses. I soak in these quiet months when the year isn’t flying by. . .yet.
When spring shows her face we will hit the ground running and we will love it. The garden will bloom. It will be a parade of beauty. The sun will be warm and the afternoons long. It will be iced tea and iced coffee, muddy feet, and water from the hose accidentally soaking us.
But for now it’s frozen puddles and purple daisies you can count on one hand. It’s stems and old sunflower stalks. It’s the yellow wildflowers still dancing with winter and it’s waiting for everything underground to show its face. It’s knowing it will. And discovering that you like to wait. At least for this.☺
Waiting in winter means spring.
And it’s the small, few & far between flowers blooming in these colder, quiet months that carry us until then! Their whispers are loud. . .More to come. Life is in the forecast.
And we agree!
Happy Winter, indeed.
Sierra V. Fedorko 