If only Spring would come in to this garden and not stand at the blue gates like a nosy neighbour who wants to spy on me but keep her distance at the same time. Spring watches me with bunches of daffodils looped around the necks of donkeys who parade by the wall in long lazy clippety clop strides. At times they look in my direction as if to laugh, their gigantic yellow teeth gape  like ancient piano keys silent in a jaded sitting room.

I rustle the curtains and note too how they have yellowed from Winter and decide to hang the fine muslin drapes stowed away in the linen closet. When I open the door, ten Winter spiders scatter and yell like frightened children as the light bulb disturbs their secretive antics. They run up the wall and out through a crack in the ceiling that disappears once they are safely dispersed.  The fine muslin drapes are there on the shelf as expected and still neatly bundled from last Fall's iron. I take them back to the window and  see the spiders run down the driveway in quick spurts and hop up onto the backs of the donkeys to seek sleep  in the velvet wombs of the daffodils. Spring throws me a nasty sign with her two fingers and I blush with fury. How dare Spring be so crude. Everyone loves Spring. Spring is supposed to be pure and angelic and new and rebirth and all things good and here is this Spring berating me for not allowing her in.  Then she shouts out ''you don't deserve me'', and gallops off down the road with the donkeys and the daffodils and the spiders and any other fragment of grass and beetle, bug, bud, stray dog, wellington boot she can find along the way. Down  the road she stops to pick up Coley and places a crown of bluebells on his small old head, a long flowing silk scarf the colour of faded roses and purple clouds around his neck. Coley smiles and bows to the trees and the black cows in the fields and when they return back up the road again, he looks in at me by the window and  I see that his face has become a yellow sun with wild irises for ears, his mouth a curled twirl of  russet grass and his hair freshly washed, is thick with bog cotton. Now I know that Spring is ready to accept me as I have opened myself up to see her as she is  and so, after she bends to whisper to Coley he beckons me with his finger tips that are the bloom of a Weeping Willow  and so, without hesitation, I wrap the muslin about my naked body and run barefoot to the road that is cool velvet with a tint of sultry moss underneath. We ride off into days where Spring never ends and oceans of flowers never cease to bloom. Now and then the donkeys stop to ponder the road. I don't mind if their gaze pierces my soul like a breeze mixed with blue teal feathers and sweet blossom of old apple trees in a place I had forgotten about, forgotten about, until now that is.