IT STARTED IN THE DEAD OF WINTER

While Barbara and I were living in Princeton, New Jersey, two sets of friends joined us in a Spring garden. Steve and Judy, Harry and Janet, and Barbara and I started planning the garden in the dead of winter.

It was cold. The nights were long. Snow fell just about every week. As a Florida boy, transplanted to the North, I was cold. And it certainly wasn’t garden planting time.

But as Einstein, who walked the Princeton campus a couple of decades before we got there, once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” And our imagination was at work, as we looked through the Burpee catalog that winter of 1975.

Cold and dark and unpleasant as it was, we ordered seeds and started dreaming of carrots and lettuce and beets and tomatoes and more.

Oh, the power of the imagination and the difficulty of waiting for reality.

Once the date for the last frost announced in the Farmer’s Almanac arrived, we prepared and planted and later enjoyed the garden of our imagination.

Have you ever done anything like that?