​"Lo, the earth awakes again" begins the Unitarian Universalist version of the traditional Christian Easter hymn.  It is a hymn that even a UU congregation can sing lustily, and it is one of my favorites.  When Diane and I lived in Vermont "lo the earth awakes again" had special meaning as by Easter, crocuses were poking up their purple and yellow heads (sometimes through the snow, left), and if we were lucky, daffodils were just beginning to flower.

Diane and I have been in Sarasota for 23 years now, and we still miss the Vermont spring flowers and flowering shrubs, but we do have our Florida version of spring to help compensate.  Our Sarasota landscape is dotted with gold trees, pink orchid trees and oak trees sporting their bright spring green coats.  Spring comes to the UUCS campus as well.  The aforementioned oak trees turn bright green, the flame vine at the northern Memorial Garden gate welcomes one to the garden with its bright orange flowers, red Easter Lilies line one of the garden pathways, right. We even have an “Easter cactus” in bloom - it didn’t bloom at Christmas but is now.  And of course,  our UUCS Memorial Garden spring colors benefit from the numerous orchids, below, that dot all corners, hanging from the fence around the pond and from locations on various trees.

The last two lines in the aforementioned UU hymn captures my feelings about a Florida spring:
   "How our spirits soar
         and sing,
    How our hearts leap
​         with the spring! "

And maybe, just maybe, by next Easter, UUCS will be “in person”, and we can gather together and sing as one voice “Lo, the earth awakes again.”  Wouldn’t that be nice!

I was in our car in the parking lot of the Venice Community Center, waiting for Diane and my second vaccination shots. I was also participating by phone on a Zoom meeting of the UUCS executive committee as I wanted to be sure to fulfill my role as church treasurer.  Being “thoroughly modern Richard”, I found I could do it by smart phone. Our car inched forward in the vaccination lane, and I could see a technician approaching, needle in hand.  I immediately hit my phone’s “mute button” - I certainly didn’t want the rest of the executive committee to hear me howling in pain from the forthcoming “jab”. “This will just burn a bit,” said the technician with a smile. She stabbed, I flinched, but of course I could barely feel it. We pulled into the fifteen minute “wait to see if you are having a problem” line, I unmuted and continued my participation in the meeting.

“I like this idea of participating in a meeting by Zoom,”I said to Diane on our way back to Sarasota. “Gardening by Zoom”, maybe?” (Diane is chair of the Grounds Crew.)

“Nope,” she said. “Your physical presence is needed. It is Golden Rain Tree seedling season and you are very good at pulling those ubiquitous little guys out of the ground. They are running amok”. 

Really? Running amok? Is that some gardening term? But I knew better than to complain and on the way home we stopped at Church. I jumped from the car, flexed my jabbed arm and proceeded to pull one hundred seedlings from the memorial garden. “Running amok” indeed!

Return of the monarchs?  Sounds like a Netflix television series, doesn’t it, but we are hoping for butterflies, not kings and queens. We had planted milkweed - which monarch butterflies love - behind the church kitchen porch a number of years ago, hoping to attract the lovely orange and black insects. During the first year or two we had success, one year producing 13 caterpillars, feeling like midwives as we watched them go thorough the whole process from egg laying to beautiful butterflies.  More recently, our luck has not been as good, as some years no monarchs were attracted at all. But this year our milkweed is flourishing, and we have seen monarch butterflies flitting about the flowers and have already discovered three caterpillars. 

A year ago our little church milkweed garden had no monarchs and, as the pandemic hit, there were no church people either as our church campus closed down. But maybe, just maybe, this year our church garden will produce beautiful butterflies and, as the pandemic eases and our membership gets vaccinated, people will be able to return to the campus as well. Butterflies and people - wouldn’t that be nice!

-Richard Happy