The garden outside is just beginning to show signs of its seasonal rebirth. In one corner of the yard a crowd of snowdrops is now congregating, hanging their small white heads modestly at their presumption. Along one edge of the brick path I notice clusters of purple crocuses (crocii?), their blossoms held vertically aloft like tiny, tightly furled umbrellas. All they’re waiting for is a signal from the sun. Yesterday while wandering through our neighborhood, I found a banquet of them already spread out and blooming on a square of south-facing lawn. It was beautiful.

Inside, though: inside we have a taste of what lies ahead, courtesy of J’s efforts back in late fall. Thanks to her the house has been perfumed, these past February days, with premonitions of the coming spring.

It began with three hyacinth bulbs, and a handful of paperwhites. Following the published directions for forcing bulbs, J left these in a back corner of the fridge for several months. In there (sharing shelf-space with unnatural companions) they drift off into bulb-delerium from the effects of cold, and lose track of the true seasons. It’s our annual play at being gods, our attempt to alter the natural order of the world. In those bulbs resided all our hopes for an early spring: the groundhog has been notoriously unreliable in that department lately…

At the end of December the bulbs were woken from their slumbers. I like to think they brought a winter’s worth of insights into other forms of life, gathered from long philosophical discussions with the carrots, the occasional fillets of fish, and the farm-raised eggs.

The hyacinth bulbs were destined for a shallow planter centered on our table: a lovely deep blue stoneware rectangle from Japan. The paperwhites just got a plain green plastic pot, the kind which breed by the dozen behind the house. They do, however, get dosed with gin.

The bulb-forcing manual — whose words J regards as inarguable Truth — call for vodka, but since there was no vodka to be had, gin was substituted. The theory is that this will stunt the growth of paperwhites, producing a manageable crop of blooms. I suspect that a shot of gin instead of mother’s milk would have held me back as well.

At times like this I think of all the joy we give the fellow who first wrote these rules on forcing bulbs. I hear him chuckling away each mid-winter until he can’t help it any longer, and belts out a belly laugh, the tears streaming down his cheeks. “Every year they do it: simply because I wrote it down and they now read it. All that good vodka going to waste…”

And then he sighs, and takes a sip from his martini — for it was the martini which brought on his annual attack of hilarity — and toasts the persuasive powers that writers have.

As I write, the hyacinths have already produced their dense fists of fragrant purple flowers. The paperwhites, though, are waist high and still growing. I guess next year we’ll have to try a stronger dose.