Alva Review-Courier -

My son is grown and lives way off in Philadelphia, and I now live alone in my little house in the country with my dogs. Sometimes days like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day can feel a little lonely, but this past Sunday was the best Mother's Day I've had in years.

About 10 days ago, I planted some vegetables and herbs from seedlings – an experiment; this is the first time I’ve actually gotten this far in my annual plan to grow my own veggies. Sunday morning, Mother's Day, I went out to check on them, like I do every morning – always half expecting to find them all boots up, victims of my never-green thumb. But they all looked exceptionally alert and healthy, and several seemed to have grown overnight! Instant joy. Great way to start the day.

They looked so much better that I wondered if 10 days might be the point at which seedlings regain their confidence after being transplanted, or if maybe it had to do with our weather that morning (overcast, occasional thunder and lightning, a droplet or two of rain) – like, maybe they were enjoying the extra ions in the air.

One of my bell pepper plants is gone, having been snapped off in the Great Wind of 2018 (a few days earlier), but my remaining bell pepper plant (who I’d been worrying about, because he seemed kind of exhausted) looked like a Buckingham Palace guard that morning, ramrod tall and feeling his plumage. (Not that it actually has any plumage, of course, but a fella can dream.)

Then the dogs (Jude and Alex) and I took our (my) coffee out onto the front porch to enjoy the petunias. Jude has a passion for petunias. He literally buries his nose among a bunch of them and just stands there, breathing them, for two minutes or more. Then he goes off to play, but every little while he’ll come back for another lungful of petunia. He doesn’t do that with anything else in the world (not that I’ve exactly tried him on everything in the world.) Well, bacon, maybe. Bacon he just wants to sit and smell, and not eat. Mmm, no. Nothing like bacon. Petunias are a unique joy in Jude's world.

So we sat out on the porch breathing the petunias and watching the herd of cattle across the dirt road. They’ve been calving, and a group of them were close by. Calves are a little more active than their mammas, naturally, being babies, but there was one calf in particular who’d clearly been eating his Wheaties – running around, gamboling and frolicking the way lambs do, kicking up his heels and trying to instigate trouble with the other calves. His mamma ran around after him, neck stretched out low, mooing long and loud, clearly saying, “Young'un, you are about to ride my last nerve.” Every now and then another mamma would moo in agreement, especially when the rambunctious calf came running by her calf, trying to get it to play.

The dogs were also fascinated by this happy little calf, and ran this way and that on our side of the dirt road, mirroring it and inspiring sullen suspicion among the cow mammas, now in a row along the fence staring at us, their faces implacable and baleful.

This is also our hummingbird season. Every year from about mid-April to mid-May a particular kind of black hummingbird migrates through here. As I sat there laughing at the calf, a hummingbird zoomed in out of nowhere, flew over the petunias and right up into my face, hovered there humming for a couple seconds (thank goodness it didn’t fly into my mouth – it could have, because my chin hit my knees), and then took off like a bat out of hell. I love the IDEA of hummingbirds, but invariably every spring at least one scares the pants off me that way. I think they come for the petunias and are affronted as heck to find me there.

So, after we’d finished our (my) coffee, Alex and I came back inside (Jude remained with his petunias) and discovered an enormous alien-shaped bug on the living room wall. I ran to get the spray (which was not where it was supposed to be, unleashing instant panic) and attempted to spray it but missed, and it dropped behind the couch, no doubt to reappear at some particularly vulnerable moment.

Ah, spring. I'm so glad it's back. And what a great Mother's Day.