One spring, a friend showed me a fuchsia she bought in a hanging basket. It was dead.

What’s more, she confessed in peals of self-deprecating laughter, it had been dead when she bought it.

“I felt sorry for it,” she said.

Thankfully, I’m not that sentimental. I love my flowers, and I prefer my plants alive. I have more than 100 varieties of perennial flowers and plants in my yard. I am always thinking there is a place to stick in one more, which is why I hate this hot spring weather.

This kind of weather is common in Minnesota, where I grew up. There, they often slide through a short spring and launch into summer in a couple of weeks. The early wildflowers, which bloom in greater profusion than any I have seen in Maine, are known by botanists as “spring ephemerals” because their lives are so short.

In Maine we are luckier. As the ground gets bare, which happens slower in the Temple hills than surrounding towns, I watch a long, slow unfolding of the spring bulbs and wildflowers, and each day I mark their progress.

But this year, the delicate bloodroot went from bare ground to pealed plants in three days, and the unseasonable heat shattered the blossoms before their allotted time. The fiddleheads are unfurling as soon as they sprout and the daffodils popped in one day, and they won’t last long because they don’t have cool days and chilly nights to extend their development. The snow pile by the barn has gone down by a foot a day and with this heat I expect it could disappear in a matter of hours.

I miss that long, promise-filled emergence.

Spring has always been the season of poets because that chance to emerge from our old selves into something new speaks profoundly to the human soul. I am reminded of a poem my late husband, Mitchell Goodman, a sometime poet, wrote:

Circles within Circles

That’s how it goes: the old man

who understands it all in the end

dies and in the same moment a new one

in the same form comes pushing up

out of the wet earth

crying out in surprise.

No matter how busy, no matter how jaded or preoccupied we may get, there is a special connection we make to life when we stop to notice “the new one” pushing up out of the wet earth.

When I was raking off the day lily bed on the east side of the house a few days ago, I thought of how when I was younger I used to do those tasks with uncorralled eagerness, wishing the plants would mature quickly to full flower, wishing they would all of them bloom at once and all summer long.

Now I am not so eager. I want nothing to rush past. When the day lilies bloom, the bloodroot and the daffodils will only be a memory. I want to take them one at a time, each in their turn, crying out in surprise with every new unfolding.