Our yard is achingly beautiful in spring – especially the mostly wooded west side. Delicate blooms of spring beauties, Dutchman’s britches, and dog-toothed violets form a carpet of white. Here and there are drifts of daffodils, patches of bluebells, stands of May apples and wild yellow violets. The sugar maple flowers form an overhead canopy of lacy chartreuse fringe. Just below are splashes of pink, white and purple/pink from dogwoods and redbuds. The air is fragrant with lilac in some places, viburnum in others. As spring progresses, those first flowers give way to Jack-in-the-pulpits, wild pink geraniums, purple trillium, and the periwinkle blue of sweet Williams. Birds of all sorts provide background music.

Taking time from our busy lives to enjoy it has become a spring ritual for my husband, Peter, and me. But each year I periodically tear myself away from that tradition and travel a few miles north on Illinois Rt. 29 for another – a visit to Jefferies Orchard for the first local asparagus of the season.

Jefferies Orchard is a Springfield area tradition that dates way back – way, way, way back – to 1822. That’s when the first Jefferies settled along the banks of the Sangamon River and began clearing the fertile soil. They’ve been there ever since.

It would be another nine years before Abraham Lincoln would move to New Salem in 1831. Doubtless Lincoln walked or rode past Jefferies Orchard as he traveled back and forth to Springfield. It’s not unlikely that he knew them, or at least knew of them.

None of the original Jefferies buildings remain these days, says the clan’s matriarch, Ruth Jefferies Anderson. “They were just little shacks – two or three rooms,” she told me. But the ivy-covered brick building and shed where Anderson sells the family’s crops have the unmistakable patina of age. The parade of produce begins with asparagus and rhubarb in spring, then moves on to strawberries, sour cherries, peaches and a host of different vegetables as the season progresses, finally finishing with pumpkins, apples and cider in fall.

“I’ve been working here seven days a week, 14 hours a day since I was three,” Anderson tells me as she trims the asparagus and weighs it, putting it into one- two- and four-pound bags. “They used to set me up out by the road with a table piled with stuff and a cigar box to make change. Of course, it was just a dirt road back then.” She’s certainly a fixture; in fact I’ve never gone to Jefferies when she wasn’t there. Sometimes she has a helper, but often Anderson is alone.

“What about winter?” I ask, half teasing.

“Surely you don’t work that much then?” “You’d be surprised,” she says. “There’s always something to do. And we have our own sawmill here. We make all our own boxes and tables and such, and cut firewood, too. This is new in here,” she says, gesturing to obviously freshly paneled walls. “We cut the wood for it last winter, and just finished putting it up.” Somehow it wouldn’t surprise me to see a hammer and nails or saw in her hand.

Anderson works slowly as we talk, at least more slowly than in her younger years. But she never stops moving, either. “My mother died when she was 96, and she didn’t stop working until the year she died,” she says. “My grandmother moved here when she was 18,” she says. “Her father was an important doctor in the Civil War – Dr. Benjamin