Tulips and azaleas in Airlie Gardens take my breath away! My husband and I have rented a beach house in Sunset Beach North Carolina for the month of April for many years. After shivering for an unseasonably cold week, we ventured out to one of our favorite spots, Airlie Gardens, a large sprawling estate, now public, filled with many kinds of flowering shrubs such as azalea, dogwood, and snowball viburnum.

This morning I was delighted to find a single daffodil blooming and “dancing” in the wind in my garden. Spring arrived two days early, I thought. The first daffodil pushing up through grey and lifeless dirt was a promise that nature renews itself with regularity each year, a promise for my summer gardens of pink ice plant, purple salvia, and others to come later, and a promise that my life will be beautiful.

Faint early morning light peaked through spare tree branches, buds swelling with the promise of spring. My mountain view, snow covered still promising winter, completed a quiet, peaceful scene. Suddenly a fox, nose to the snow, darted this way and that through bits of light brown vegetation poking through a white drift. I stepped out on the balcony, four floors up, and saw the bushy tail trailing a body of reddish grey as it hunted for mice below the snow.