This morning I’m thinking of friendship, especially friendship of long standing. People who go back years and how much they become a part of your life.
I had time to contemplate this on the drive home yesterday, which was up into the mountains where it barely looked like spring, then down into the alleys where spring is in full flower.
Longtime friendship is like that, too, seasons and altitudes, peaks and valleys. Through them all, a long river of connection.
Walking is witnessing, a way to be present in movement and in time.
Yesterday’s stroll took me from the oldest part of Reston to the newest, from a community center to a commercial plaza, from a small cafe to a bustling bakery.
And all along I’m thinking spring. The dogwood, the azalea, the first green of the oaks and poplars. How lovely it is to see it unfold along familiar paths, how grateful I was to witness its unfolding.
The Kwanzan cherries are spreading their heavy arms, wowing us, as they always do, with their big-fisted blossoms. Dogwood are playing it closer to the vest, but they’re almost peak bloom, too.
I worried I’d missed the Virginia bluebells, but yesterday I scooted out for a late-morning hike on the Bluebell Trail that runs along the Potomac River. The flowers were primo, scattered fetchingly among the phlox and ferns with the river roaring in the distance.
Moving through springtime beauty is one of the best ways to ingest it, to make it stick. Which is what I want to do now, to inhale the loveliness, to claim it as my own. But that, as we know, is not possible. Walking through and past the flowers reminds me that they, like all of us, are present only a short while. We make time to see them when they’re here — and then let them go.
As last week’s rains were falling, the great engine of spring was whirring silently. I could see very little change out my office window, but plants were still prepping for a great leap forward.
At first, the gold of the wood poppies blended with the yellow of the daffodils. But now the smaller flowers are coming into their own. They are filling the far backyard, the part that’s wooded and wild. They are spreading a carpet of bloom.
I just saw a fox pause among the flowers, look around and trot on.
(The wood poppies in bloom: all that’s missing is the hammock.)
This photo may feature baby chicks, but the peeps I’m thinking about come from small frogs, spring peepers.
The racket comes from males trying to attract females (which accounts for much of the racket in the animal world this time of year), and it can grow quite loud along a path I walk that edges a wetland.
I was glad to hear it yesterday, though. I’d been listening for spring peepers since I arrived home but had missed the distinctive, high-pitched sound.
Now the little critters have spoken: spring is here to stay.
I never put the garden to bed last fall, so last weekend I opened the chickenwire enclosure used to keep the deer at bay and waded into the tangle of old growth. There were the tall stalks of zinnias and dried coneflower heads. There were the long stems of Siberian iris and the hollow-core canes of day lilies.
This can be a melancholy task to perform in autumn, less a harvest than a confiscation. But done in late winter, when green shoots are already pushing up from the soil, it’s a hopeful and much-needed clearing, a spring cleaning.
As I pulled and tugged and gathered, a familiar scent tickled my nostrils. It was mint: the plant is already growing. I picked a few tiny sprigs to have in my iced tea.
Can summer be far behind?
(The garden in early July.)
So we have finally come to the end of January, the longest month. I’m convinced it has at least 40 days. No wait, that’s Lent, and it will be arriving soon enough.
But today we’re in the clear. It’s February 2, and the groundhog has predicted an early spring. Based on the blooming snowdrops and hellebores, on the inch-long daffodil shoots in the front yard and the faint fuzz of bloom on the witch hazel tree in back, I’d say the groundhog’s prediction may be true.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, though, the rodent has been right only 40 percent of the time. So I won’t pack away the hats, gloves and wool sweaters just yet. I won’t wish him wrong, either.
The snow is falling as I write. It’s piling up on the deck, weighing down the potted ivy, filling in the footsteps, smothering the covered chaise. After having no snow for 24 months, two storms in a week have dumped more than a half a foot here.
As mentioned earlier, I’m not a skier or a snow-shoer, and I tiptoe around ice. But I love to watch the white stuff coming down, to marvel at the way it clings to every branch and twig. I like the way it banishes the wanness of winter, the contrast it provides.
As it grows lighter here, ghost trees emerge from the backyard: spindly white arms, tall dark trunks. Small birds clog the feeder, land lightly on a snow bank, fluff the flakes with their little tails.
Soon I’ll celebrate the 14th anniversary of this blog, which was conceived in snow, made possible by the week off work that snow provided. Snow was my first topic. Strange since we have so little of it anymore. Another way in which these pages celebrate not only the here-and-now but also the soon-to-be-gone.
When I woke a little after 7, the sun had not yet begun to strike the sides of the big oaks I can see across the road. But it was light enough to assure me not all the snow had blown off trunks, limbs and branches.
Traces of high contrast are still there, the symphony, synchrony, of black and white. The only color I see in my window-scape is the barest touch of dark green from the hollies at the fence line. But I’ll soon find more in the Great Outdoors, having somewhere to be in less than an hour.
“Take winter as you find him,” wrote James Russell Lowell, “and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him. And tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run.”
We’ll see about that.
