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There’s no point in denying the obvious: I’ve got a bad case of cabin fever.

I am ready for spring. I’ve had enough of coats and sweaters and hot drinks to ward off the chill and extra blankets at night or even while sitting around in the evening in front of the television.

Bring on the shorts and sandals and digging in the garden. Let’s hear it for short-sleeved shirts and tall, cold drinks and supper off the grill in the backyard.

There’ve been a few days of late that have given us a taste of what it’ll be like once the weather turns. Such relief, unfortunately, is only transitory.

Traditionally, spring begins at the vernal equinox, the date when the earth’s axis is turned so that the day is exactly 12 hours long. According to a table I found on the Internet, that date this year is March 20.

When spring comes, I’ll be ready. One of my Christmas gifts was one of those bird-feeder-on-a-pole gizmos that let you hang several feeders to simultaneously attract different species of avian visitors. I’ve got a spot all picked out and bought during the winter, a few of the feeders and other attachments that I’ll need to complete the assembly.

In the back of my mind is the nagging thought that to erect this contraption I’ll need to drive a stake a couple of feet into the ground. Past experience suggests that most of what serves as my backyard is mostly rock covered by a scant few inches of clay with a skim of topsoil, so that may prove to be a challenge, but we’ll see.

I’ve thought also that the corner where I want to put the feeder pole would be a good place for a butterfly garden, so I plan to fix that up as well. Actually, I got a few extra rocks last year when I re-did my water garden, so they’re already in place.

And, speaking of the water garden, I think I’ll reintroduce fish this spring. This will be the fourth summer for the water garden, as I count it. After two summers in which my fish mainly seemed to be providing dietary supplements to the herons and raccoons in the neighborhood, I didn’t get any last year, and the water feature seemed incomplete without them, so I’ll be getting some this year and will deal with the scavengers as best I can.

Unfortunately, we don’t have much space for a garden where we live, as our postage-stamp backyard is mostly taken up with a couple of wooden decks. Mostly we do our horticulture in containers, which seem to work better for flowers than for vegetables. I tried some of those hanging tomato planters two years ago but with only moderate success — that is, I got a few scrawny tomatoes. In retrospect, I think I probably didn’t feed the plants enough once I got them established, so I may try again this year. Like Guy Clark’s song says, there’s only two things that money can’t buy, that’s true love and home-grown tomatoes.

And so I guess I’ll have to just knuckle down for this last month of winter. Until that day comes I’ll have to keep dressing up warm and pile on the extra covers in the evening. Having been through this quite a few times already, of course I know that spring is coming like it has every year. It’s just that the wait seems so long when it’s so cold.

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