There was still snow regularly fluffing up the ground when I pulled out my seed starter this past winter. I enlisted my kids to extract seeds from little packages with technicolor images, and I was a little giddy with the vivid pictures in my head of a blooming porch and deck. For more than a month, my little sunroom was overtaken by pots, sitting there like kids waiting for summer vacation.

But then, I traveled for nearly a month, leaving my kids to maintain watering. Oh. And then there was a drought, to the point that the wooden Smoky the Bear stationed next to the highway held a sign reading the fire danger was “extreme” (and indeed, resulted in at least three area forest fires). In no shortage of irony or demise to my ailing plants, last week brought five afternoons of hail, plus area flooding that shut down the main highway. I was dumping water from the peonies I’d purchased, their two limp, torn leaves a far cry from the pink globes in my head.