As a rule, I do not like springtime. Too much changes too quickly, and it always leaves me feeling hot and dirty, caught wearing my winter coat on the day when the temperature makes a surprise rally above the 60 degree mark. I don't even like spring holidays. Easter is so troubling; trying to think my way through the resurrection always gets me down. And Saint Patrick's Day in Boston tends to be filthy holiday when all the smells of winter suddenly rise from the city streets in the heat of the first thaw, and combine with the nauseating smell of too many drunken students to disastrous effect.

What I do love about springtime are bulbs. My first real experience with them came when I was eleven years old and my family took a trip to Washington D.C. for Easter Week. Up until that point, my notion of spring flowers was limited to my enjoyment of "sourgrass," a yellow flowering weed that crops up after the January rain in San Diego. I used to like to eat it, and it was an adequate substitute for daisies if one wanted to make flower necklaces.

As lovely as the San Diego spring was, though, it was wholly different from the experience that met us in Washington. By miraculous chance, we arrived in the city on the day that the cherry blossom trees burst into full blossom; the stunning pepto-bismol pink seemed almost shockingly irreverent, a mocking tide that lapped at the ankles of the city's monuments and parks. (On a return visit to D.C. last year I arrived just in time for the 14-year cycle Cicadae breeding season, and was astonished by the swarms of large, red-eyed bugs that flew dumbly into our nations' great architecture. I can only think that there is a lesson in my D.C. visits about Nature's regard for the modern nation-state.)

As amazing as the cherry-blossoms were, though, they could not compare to my first experience of bulbs. They seemed to be planted everywhere that year; on the streets in planters, around the houses, in pots in restaurants. On Easter Sunday, we skipped church and went instead to an open air market, where the flower vendors' buckets overflowed with tulip blossoms still furled into delicate points. Though this was one of my first experiences with a big east coast city, I also remember it as one of my most profound experiences with nature. I was so impressed by the joy people seemed to have in the end of winter and the beginning of spring, and I liked the way that city people, who lived in narrow houses squished wall-to-wall and room-to-room took such care to plant these beautiful flowers.

Now that I count myself among their number I'm glad to be able to plant some bulbs myself. The yearly resurrection of flowers is a consolation in a world that seems often to change at otherwise unmanageable pace.