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When I read “the blessed best month” I thought what you went on to say…your birthday month, and Mrs Durned’s, right around horse shoes range from your own.

So, how not the blessedest month?
It can be a wonderful month here in Tejas, and we’ll overlook the occasional year when the weather thinks it’s mid-August.

I could go for a white agapanthus. And the other white flowers, too. I’ve wanted a moon garden for 30 years (to keep me company when I am star-gazing). But we are on the edge of the Caprock, and the ground is so hard and our water is equally hard. Roses do surprisingly well here though. Maybe I’ll just plant white roses by the dozens and call it good.

And those 70 lavender plants that I sprouted from seed a few years ago? Four plants survived, and are now bravely waving their little stalks in the wind—20 mph wind. That’s what my spring is like: constant wind. I haven’t flown my flags since February.

No lambs, but little white-faced Herefords.

O, TO be in England
Now that April ‘s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossom’d pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That ‘s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!