Spring is coming!

This week in tea class, one of my classmates brought in a seasonal sweet that she had made.  She called it shitamo'e, or budding grasses, because it looks like the beginning of spring underneath the snow.

Isn't it lovely?

Counterintuitively, because it is late February we performed a particular temae that is meant to keep things feeling warm during a very cold part of winter.  However, while walking around the neighborhood where I work the other day, I saw my own shitamo'e, in the form of the first daffodil shoots of the season.