"It wasn't a dream!"

That's right folks, already some of my little plant-babies have bravely stuck their heads up out of the dirt and into the sunshine. Doesn't it look happy? Like it's shouting, "Yay! Here I am!"

Have you ever seen the movie, "My Neighbor Totoro"? If not, you should, because it's wonderful and magical and adorable. At one of my favorite points in the movie, the two little girls who are the main characters are given a bundle of magic seeds and acorns, which they plant in the yard. Over the next several days, they check them obsessively, trying to see if they're growing. Nothing happens until one night, the girls have a dream (or was it a dream?) that their magic seeds grow into a huge tree. The next morning when they wake up, the tree is gone, but the seeds have indeed sprouted and started to grow. The girls are ecstatic, and they dance around shouting "It was only a dream!" and "It wasn't a dream!"

I mention this because I feel like I'm living it right now. I, too, have been obsessively checking my garden since planting the seeds this last Tuesday. Even though I knew it would take several days, maybe even a week, before I saw anything sprout, I couldn't help but worry every time I checked on them and found nothing. What if I planted them too deep? What if they don't germinate because it's not warm enough? What if that rain storm washed them away, or scrambled them all up?

Then, two nights ago, I dreamed about my garden, about it sprouting and growing. Just like in the movie, my dream garden grew tall and bloomed right before my eyes. And then I woke up. But again, like the movie, when I went outside first thing in the morning to check on the garden and give it some water, I found that my dream had come true, at least partially. One of the zinnias had sprouted!

I knew it was a zinnia because it was wearing its little 'seed hat,' which I recognized from planting it four days ago. Four days! That's it! Amazing. It seemed like forever, while I was waiting for them, but when I actually stop and think about it, that is amazingly fast.

That day several more seedlings broke through the surface: a few cosmos, another zinnia, and most of the marigolds. Today, they've been joined by even more, and now nearly all the seedlings of those three flowers have come up. Everything else is still hiding, and those worries I had before haven't gone away completely, but it's so exciting to see the little baby flowers starting to grow. If anything, I'm checking them even more obsessively now than I did before, and every time they seem bigger.

Isn't life amazing?