In the luscious quiet of a new morning, I tiptoe past the garden on my way through the field to the woods. She’s asleep beneath her blankets of compost, mulch, and flattened cardboard boxes I repurposed from the recycle bin at work. The 6 x 6 planks that frame the raised beds are stoic and patient as the space above them flutters with the ghosts of last year’s harvest. We’ve already mapped out the area where we’ll plant potatoes and onions this spring, garlic is in and out of sight, doing whatever garlic does in mid-January, and a pile of woodchips from the grandmotherly silver maple we trimmed last November is looking forward to covering the paths between the rows of future strawberry spinach and amaranth. In the middle of it all, a young volunteer mulberry sapling pauses its stretch toward the sky, saving its strength for a spring growth spurt. Tucked into the morning’s latest winter scene—bare trees dusted with a confectioner’s sprinkling of snow—the garden looks peaceful and trusting, willing to hold on carefully to the tender roots of whatever starts we truck out on planting day in the two-wheeled garden cart that still holds the top spot on our “Best Purchases for Outdoor Projects” list. She’s counting on our careful planning and discretion and we’re determined not to let her down.

And…the seed catalogues have started to arrive, in nonstop glorious full-color succession.

Some of them are just too indulgent to be allowed, with their vibrant and precisely staged layouts of rich purple cabbage and pole beans, twelve varieties of basil (I want them all), melons with neon orange or red insides wrapped in dark green striped or speckled outsides, and those Atomic Grape tomatoes that almost change colors as you watch them ripen (we have a couple of strategically-placed lawn chairs in the garden’s paths so we can do just that). As much as I love winter’s muted palette of greys and whites interrupted by tawny browns and deep evergreen, I freely admit to leafing through the pages of the catalogue du jour on the top of the stack to soak in the electric colors of this year’s zinnias and cosmos. My eyes drenched in such ocular delights, even for a few moments, helps me push on through some of the rougher days. I encourage you to try it.

Today, under a moth-eaten blanket of clouds and slow-motion snowfall, the warm breath and cheerful technicolor displays of spring aren’t even visible on the mind’s horizon. I’m fine with that—you know, live in the present—but at night I can set my dreams to a different station, and so I do. In the dark behind my eyelids after midnight, I imagine those raised beds bursting with kale and corn mache, tender French Breakfast radishes and Bull’s Blood beets (the dark blackish-purple leaves an excellent shot of color for any mixed salad). Butterflies and bees flit about pollinating anything they can get their little feet on, and the row of cattle panels bent into curved trellises anchored with t-posts are dripping with Lemon cucumbers and three different kinds of plum tomatoes. I walk through this tunnel of lush green in a flowing cotton sundress and eat the warm fruit right from the vines (this girl knows how to dream).

I can hear Patrick’s garden dreams as he slumbers by my side, though his imaginings lean heavily toward soldier-straight rows of everything we’ve planted, each seedling in its place and perfectly spaced per seed packet directions. He built all those raised beds so he’s entitled to a vision of precision and orderliness (I’m quite fine with a more higgledy-piggledy layout, letting our green children run wild and barefoot in their formative days until my inner adult tries to tame them after its far too late. One of the many reasons I don’t have human offspring). When we both wake up after a long and delicious night of such meanderings, it’s a harder task to transfer these images to paper, drafting a Garden Plan that each year, we swear we’ll abide by no matter what. We write down what goes where and in which raised bed, who’s in charge of what garden sections, and a daily maintenance schedule that resembles arriving and departing flights at O’Hare. Being mere mortals, however, our ambitions can easily dissolve in the weariness at the end of our day jobs (which help fund this whole botanical enterprise) and we make a less-impassioned promise to get out there tomorrow and dig the rows for those Ruby Crescent fingerlings we’ve been eager to grow. Thinking of those potatoes on our plates, roasted and drizzled in just the right amount of olive oil and pink Himalayan salt, is enough motivation to follow through.

Given the current state of affairs, these garden dreams have sometimes been hijacked by others, manifesting our worst fears (more violence and riots, a virus that has no “off” switch) and creating nightmares that don’t end when we open our eyes. We keep falling asleep anyway, night after winter night, tucked trustingly in the arms of hope, holding fistfuls of seed packets and tiptoeing past the promise of spring asleep in the humble field behind the house.