Yes, I know it is not quite March, and yes, I know I live in Minnesota where spring doesn’t officially arrive until just after Memorial Day, but I can’t help it. I’ve got spring fever and I’ve got it bad. A couple of days in the 30s and I swear my cheeks got some color. Daylight till 5:30 pm and my death march from the law school seems almost tolerable. I’m so anxious for spring I finally give a crap that the pitchers and catchers reported for spring training. It’s true. This last winter was just so bad that it’s gone and made me a baseball fan.

All kidding aside, this will be my first full-cycle rotation on my locavore pledge and once again I’m finding nothing but metaphor. I wrote about the process of putting my garden to bed, about looking in my stocked freezer and taking comfort in the coming cold and the contemplative nature of winter, but I’ve got to say, right about now I’m the end of my rope. I’ve gone through just about everything from my garden and csa. At this point I’m down to a couple bunches of kale and a few roasted tomatoes. But when I go to the coop and see the asparagus, leeks, and lettuce…oh the lettuce…..and I look at my calendar and see it’s not even March. Sigh. Let’s just say this commitment to local, seasonal foods is a lot easier in July.

Of course I’ve cheated on occasions. When I hosted the Christmas that would never end (2 weeks nonstop family. I love them all dearly but ohmygod) I had to buy salad and other veggies because it’ll take some time to get everyone on board with root vegetable potage (delicious, by the way) and braised collards more than once. But for the most part I’ve been pretty faithful to my pledge, something I’m sure Kelly would tell you has it’s own challenges. I’m kind of out of ideas on how to make squash, for example, but we still have a fair amount of it. There’s something that seems inherently wrong to me about freezing the squash to use in the summer. So instead we are muscling through, not really enjoying the end of our winter produce season so much as surviving it.

That works on a personal level as well. The height of winter brought a new series of professional challenges, and it is just now, as we begin to have our first mini-thaw, that I can see a way through. Little shoots of hope break through what otherwise feels like hopelessly frozen ground. During my hibernation I came to understand a lot about 2009 and see how that knowledge needs to work in 2010, and at the February, I’m starting to apply those lessons. My guess is the results will be equal parts awesome and stressful, but I’m looking forward to this next year, even if spring brings some upheaval. But I guess without the upheaval we’d have no growth, right? Shoots literally pushing through the seemingly packed and solid ground–if that is not imagery of my professional path for 2010 then I’m a pretty worthless blogger.

So with excitement and some trepidation I await my coming spring. I survive the end of winter knowing that the struggle to survive is about to change to the struggle to thrive. I’m pretty confident that with the right amount of light, warmth, and tending to the results will be well worth it. Now I just have to get past that whole breaking through the frozen ground part.