This lovely week of sunshine makes me imagine it will never get really cold again. Then I remember that April Fool's Day blizzard some years ago. We have fires in the fireplace until early May, when we can finally sit outside in the evenings instead of huddling by the hearth. Ted made a new mantle for the fireplace this winter, which has taken the living room from the 1960's back to the 1800's. That's progress! I'm having fun learning to arrange objects on the mantle, and can't wait to put vases of spring flowers on it. (If you have a cat that eats flowers, a mantle is the perfect place to display tulips.)

I'm still picking up sticks and twigs from winter storms, and instead of tossing them on The World's Largest Brush Pile, I put them in paper bags and store them in the garage as ready made kindling bundles. To build a fire, I just put a bag of twigs on the hearth, lay on some smallish pieces of wood, and light the bag.

Snowdrops growing in sunspots-places that warm up early, like in front of the south facing house foundation-started blooming here after Christmas, but others in colder locations didn't come up until late February. I planted one group of them in the little front cottage garden, forgetting that it is right where we pile snow. Those didn't bloom until last week.

Snowdrops are sometimes tricky to get established. One time, I bought 100 bulbs from a garden center, but only about 15 came up, though those few have finally spread. However, about 7 years ago I ordered another 100 from the Van Engelen bulb catalog and they've gone from strength to strength ever since. Now they pop up all over the place, since they drop their seeds and ants carry them to wherever ants live, which is just about everywhere around here. The first year there is just a slender grassy shoot, but the second year it blooms. The third year, there is a little clump, and so on.

I used to hear that the best way to get snowdrops established is to move them "in the green," which sounds like a St. Patrick's Day expression. It means to transplant them while they are still growing, instead of after the foliage has died down for the year. That used to be discouraging, since I didn't know anyone who had enough snowdrops to share with me. Now I've got plenty of my own, so on Wednesday, St. Patrick's Day, a really fun day when I had both a tea party and a dinner party to go to, I potted up snowdrops to take as hostess presents. It's not always a good idea to inflict an unrequested plant on a friend, but to paraphrase that old Sara Lee commercial, "Nobody doesn't like snowdrops."