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We're due for snow again tomorrow, the sort that people call weather, you know, with the italics in their voices. I can't remember when we saw bare ground last here, and that's even unique for Minnesota. Some years I wiggled at the window like a five year old, crossing my eyes and my fingers, hoping for a white Christmas. This year, it started around Thanksgiving and just didn't stop coming.

Despite all this, it does not stop me from dreaming about next year's garden. Last night, I dreamed the snow all vanished, that I had put seedlings in the ground, that it was still January, and because the little bits were so easily fooled, I had two eggplants, two beefsteak tomatoes (strangely square shaped too), snap peas, carrots, perfect zucchinis, all coming up, popping right off their stalks. In January. In Minnesota.

I picked up one of those monthly gardening guides for Minnesota while doing inventory at work (ah, the curse of inventory: organizing and checking those shelves is like watered down shopping; I tried to pick sections I wouldn't salivate over as much, but I wound up being assigned to science and nature, gardening, sociology... Fortunately not fiction, but still, I did not have a chance). I don't know if I've ever read a reference book such as this cover-to-cover, but it's my intention to do so with this one, along with a book Chris gave me: Worms Eat my Garbage. Part of my reasoning behind not reading these sorts of books but browsing instead is because facts simply don't stick in my brain, no matter how excited I get by learning. I am working to change that.

Tonight I signed up for a class called From Farm to Fork: Becoming a Part of the Slow Food Movement. I'm looking forward to settling in with a community of people who are at the beginning stages as I have been, who have been dabbling maybe for a few years (as I have been), and who want to make more of a commitment. Who look out into their yard, see the debris of last year's garden, and can only imagine possibilities.