Afriend who is a bit of a philosopher reminds me that in the upcoming gift-giving season most people need above all else the gift of appreciation and encouragement. He tells about a colleague who, à propos of nothing in particular, sent an email to ten friends. It said, "Congratulations on a good year. Well done". Eight of them accepted the praise as perceptive and replied "Thanks. Glad you noticed" - or some such sentiment. One replied, "Actually, I've had a hell of a year". That used to mean a very bad one. More recently it can mean an exceptionally good one. As my friend says, "Whatever".

The most encouraging thing one can say this week is that we are half way back to the first week of June. It seems so short ago [Why not? It 's the opposite of 'long ago'] that we were at the mid-point of the current year, the time when we were shopping for annual plants and receiving the ones we had ordered earlier. Only those who are playing with less than a full deck will plant annuals up here on the roof of Ontario before 01/06/08. Note to those who need it: That does not mean January 6.

I am looking forward a mere 12 weeks. Twelve weeks ago the new university term was just beginning. In that much more time we'll be in the third week of Lent, 2008.

I shall be planning an order for geraniums, begonias (tuberous and fibrous), zinnias and impatiens that will be delivered the first Saturday of June.

Other plants will be bought later to complete the 2008 garden when those favourites are in place. In less time than that I shall acquire those first few flats of pansies that can brave a chill Dufferin April day and be retired, if necessary, to overnight shelter in the garage where it is then seldom less than a spring-like 7/8 degrees. As Ophelia said, "pansies are for thoughts" and a garden lover's thoughts are always well above zero degrees Celsius.

In another two weeks the days will begin to lengthen, the sun will cross the equator and those who do not believe in intelligent cosmic design will seem a little like fish that may debate the existence of the water in which they live or of the pre-existent H and O that create it.

As abovesaid, Saturday 7 June will (D.V.) be my planting day.

I say 'Deo volente' without hesitation. It is "God willing", because, as a wise old person used to tell me, "You never know what a day may bring forth".

That is even truer of a year. But that didn't worry her unduly. She liked to quote Robert Browning, "Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be / The last of life for which the first was made".

Like the two-faced Roman deity, Janus, who looked both backward and forward and so had the month of January named for him, I have the habit of frequently using a rear-view mirror as well as watching the road ahead. You, too, may often think, "Two months ago I was - - and two months from now I'll be - - ".

Happiness has been defined as many things but, surely, its best definition is the ability both to remember and to plan ahead. An unhappy day could be defined as one to which one does not look forward, one for which one cannot not plan and for which one has neither obligations nor expectations.

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day", mused Macbeth. With the serenity of my case clock which is too tall for a shelf and therefore has stood for 100 years on the floor, the pendulum of a happy mind moves to and fro between the minutes that make the hours, the days and the years that pass into eternity.

Although I do not have much in common with the poet Percy Shelley - except that he drowned in the Mediterranean on a July day that in the following century would become my birthday - his poetry lights these winter days. Who has not responded to the optimism in Ode to the West Wind, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind"?

And there are those lines in his political poem called, intriguingly, The Revolt of Islam that read "I dreamed that as I wandered by the way / Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring". Equally fine was his desire for that poem, "to kindle an enthusiasm for liberty and justice which neither violence nor prejudice can totally extinguish in mankind".

Meanwhile, another enthusiasm is kindling in the mind of one who does appreciate a snowy winter for a reasonable 12 or 13 weeks. That is the anticipation of the first flash of springtime lightning and the subsequent roll of thunder after the silence of the winter sky. One thinks of the lovely Italian word primavera, that first touch of green after the barrenness of winter.

Robert Browning's Homethoughts from Abroad include, "Oh, to be in England

now that April's here" and Alfred Noyes wrote "Go down to Kew [Botanical Gardens] in lilac time, it isn't far from London".

Ontario lilacs come later, in May, but aroma therapists recommend their scent and that of June's lily of the valley as the antidote to the winter 'blahs' after the Christmas evergreens have gone the way of all seasonal decorations. And, for me, there is Nina Ricci's "L'air du temps" fragrance that recalls someone "loved long since and lost awhile".

Winter, no less than summer, needs its monthly holidays - more than greeting card occasions. On the way back to the next Canada Day we still await the proposed mid- January celebration of the birthday (11 January, 1815) of Sir John AMacdonald, the first prime minister of this Dominion.

Naturally, it should be a long weekend. And there is a Flag Day in our future to commemorate the raising of the Maple Leaf on 15 February, 1965.

Easter Day comes on 23 March, 2008 by which time we'll be halfway back to high summer.

Sursum corda!