Springy, Happy, Girly

I swear I can smell spring.  The snow is starting to melt, and if I were where you probably are my kids would be playing outside.  But, we still have a foot or so of snow to melt.  Dirty, gray, snow.  And then we'll probably get more.  BUT my thoughts are drifting toward spring and I am craving

Pretty things to look at and smell

How very girly.  We would really have to do some fast talking to get this feature past some feminists. But I will ditch the feminist word before I ditch our celebrations of girlyness.  What pretty sights and smells make you think of spring and make your heart soar? To momentarily escape endless gray?

Tulips, hands down, are the undeniable sign of spring.  They might be my favorite flower.  They only bloom for maybe two weeks and then leave an unsightly mess of rotting leaves in the garden for another two months, but they are so worth it.  I always plant them.  When they bloom, winter gets a final kick in the pants.  They are exquisitely beautiful and unlike any other flower.  I have been known, in the doldrums of winter, to sit with a bulb catalog and feast my eyes on all the different varieties.  And nothing looks more gorgeous on my dining room table than a tall vase full of gently drooping, almost open tulip buds.

Except maybe a mass of daisies in the same vase in the summer.  Daisies are abundant bloomers, easy growers, and I always plant them too.  I am a vestige of an old soul who still believes in handwritten letters on good stationary, and also planting cutting gardens.  Daisies are so happy and sunshiney with their yellow and white faces. They go with other flowers in bouquets or are pretty all by themselves. A packet of seeds is a buck and you get all that happiness all summer long.  But because I'm SUCH a sucker, if I don't have enough for a bouquet in my own patch (or can't bring myself to cut them because they look so pretty by the picket fence), I can fall to the bouquets in the farmer's market as well. I think I have passed this on to my children, because do you know what they always want me to buy in the grocery store? Flowers.  If it snows a foot again, I may indulge us.

I am also a sucker for dreamy smelling bath gel.  In one of my daughter's books, the main character, a pig named Poppleton, takes lavender and lemon silky milk baths.  The first time we read that book, we promptly went out and bought the ingredients. (http://www.thebodyshop-usa.com/aromatherapy/prod778851, and lemon essential oil).  My daughter was really little, of the age when she still had heavenly baby-smelling skin.  I used to love to wrap that silky little lavender-lemon-baby-heaven child up in a towel and inhale deeply.

I can be tempted by lesser products.  Wegman's has the best marketers.  IF by chance I must wait in line, their "since you're waiting in line..." displays are the only ones in any store where I buy things.  But they put things there like hand-dipped chocolate covered cherries and the like.  Come on.  Recently, they put bottles of Softsoap bath gel in a bin with a really low price tag. I idly picked up the different scents as I waited, and suddenly I was hooked and reeled in.  Sweet orange peel honeysuckle blossom or something like that.  I had been using bars of Ivory bought on sale, in a value pack, with a coupon, for too long.  And somehow this shower gel smelled like heaven or at least like spring or at the VERY least not like Ivory soap.  Wait - did I have a coupon?!  So now every day I relish the small joy of orange peel honeysuckle blossom in the shower.

What provides your springy, happy, pretty, girly little moments of escape? Please share them.  Everyone needs new ideas for getting through the rest of winter.