There is nothing like the faithful arrival of the Lenten Rose. Out of the spare, reflective season of lent, in the last days of winter, these blooms defy the cold earth and come right up through the snow.

Ours are a bit hidden down a lane in the middle garden, so I don’t regularly happen upon them. Usually there’s a moment in the dreary chill of March when I suddenly remember them, pull on my boots, and tromp out to investigate. Inevitably, they have already quietly arrived, sturdy and beautiful, bowing among a blanket of last fall’s oak leaves.

In the early days of the 2020 Covid quarantine, Easter arrived in the midst of the fear and loneliness of the pandemic. That year, I cut some of our Lenten Roses for the table, and remember thinking it all felt more Lenten than Easter.

Four years later, and I’m still thinking about that. Easter shows up anyway, popping up right in the midst of the weary world. A green, growing, blooming thing to restore us.

As I think I’ve mentioned here before, I love Jane Kenyon’s work, and this poem captures that familiar longing for winter’s end – literally and figuratively, too.

February: Thinking of Flowers

By Jane Kenyon

Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.

Nothing but white–the air, the light;
only one brown milkweed pod
bobbing in the gully, smallest
brown boat on the immense tide.

A single green sprouting thing
would restore me. . . .

Then think of the tall delphinium,
swaying, or the bee when it comes
to the tongue of the burgundy lily.