I have never spent Spring in Colorado.

The last 14 years I've spent Spring in Honolulu.

With the frigid temperatures almost a memory here in the Rockies, the chaotic rush of farmers and ranchers and animals is breathtaking. Farmers plow their fields into tidy rows, ready to grow another huge crop of corn or tomatoes or peppers. They drive around on ATV's hauling plow parts reveling in their jeans jackets and heads free from hats. Every field is full of mother cows and calves, ducks and ducklings, birds of all kinds swooping down low to feed on freshly hatched insects.

Yellow jonquils line all the yards in town. White pipes surround green alfalfa fields ready to be put back together to funnel ditch water. Ditches are burned diligently all over this valley to clear them. My job is to prune back the fruit trees this spring. Our apple, cherry and pear trees have been left to grow wild for the last 20 years.  So I'll prune back the trees in hopes that a new heavy growth of fruit will bloom. The grape vines, stark and empty, promise a new crop of grapes for our local wineries, the dirt beneath them turned over, dark and rich and pulling in the sun.

We signed up with a local farmer early so that when he starts producing his organic food in May we can start picking up our weekly box of onions and radishes, peppers and squash. I plan my own small garden with my to do list: buy cinder blocks, buy soil and seeds, sketch out where to plant what. We buy screen doors to keep out the flies and blinds to finally put on the windows which have been without and open to the world since August. We buy our cousin's hot tub so that at night we can sit and watch the stars. We'll spy on the neighbors cat who has adopted us and comes to eat her cat food from the red bowl we leave on the porch for her each night. 

Huge woodpeckers cling to our log home and try to find a way inside. Sleek Magpies peck at the dog food every morning causing Joe the dog to go crazy to run them off; they taunt him merrily and he runs after them as they fly over the river, only stopping when he can no longer see them. An injured elk lives on our river bank; he is laying low waiting for his leg to heal. The cool air still sucks at the warmth and we wear sweaters and jackets.

The dogs haul home deer legs and skulls and scatter them around like so many rawhides. Every time I see Joe with a furred deer leg in his mouth I think: "Good God," and then wander on to something else. There is still snow on the mountain but white blossoms on the trees. The roadkill has turned from deer in the winter to raccoons in the spring. Each time I pass a chubby, masked coon, laying on the side of the road, I feel sad. My belly is covered with poison ivy [or something I'm allergic to around here] and I wear my cowboy boots all the time. The alfalfa is starting to grow towards its first cutting, the planters need new lavender plants and we have tiny tree's to plant up and down the driveway.

I don't miss the pacific ocean or the trade winds of Honolulu. If I ever do, the coast of California is only 13 hours away. My husband rides by on his blue tractor and I pause to catch a glimpse of a couple of bluebirds.

It's spring in Colorado.