These words of Emily Dickinson, - I find them poignant and am mindful of them as February advances slowly and erratically into spring.

Last night I slept fitfully. When I wakened early in the morning, about two a.m., the moon cast a bright light to the north, and I lay watching it through the upper window, enchanted with the porcelain glow.

I didn't fall back to sleep immediately, and when I finally closed my eyes I drifted into that state of wakeful sleep, where you are conscious of being on the cusp, and your mind is still busily sorting and shifting and filing the day into the little drawers of the brain (or the heart, or the soul - I am confident that some things we remember in the heart and those are the things that stay with us to the end).

I woke, again and again, and then drifted back into the same dreamlike state, until finally I was conscious enough to control my thoughts and began to plan the coming day.

I would go into the garden! And so was born Hope. I would go into the garden with a shovel and move some of the drifted snow off the patio and the pathway, and perhaps a little where the bulbs are planted and where the Lenten Roses grow, to see if spring lay waiting beneath the snow that melts by day and freezes by night.

What a lovely plan, but first of all I must feed the birds, and make some vegetable soup for lunch and change the linen on the beds..and then I must go and pick up a friend to go to a ladies' meeting. And then, of course, it was time for happy hour, and dinner, and I never did get into the garden, even though I dreamt and hoped that life was stirring beneath the softened snow.

Well, "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings...." and tomorrow is another day.