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Category: seasons

Holly Blossom Time

Holly Blossom Time

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I drive with the windows down now. Not just because I like the wind in my face but also because the air smells like honeysuckle and holly blossom.

The former is a well known harbinger of summer; the latter has taken me a while to recognize. It is subtle and tender, not as overpowering as honeysuckle but just as redolent of warm weather and freedom.

Here is the holly flower, blurry and slightly past peak. A blossom hidden under the canopy of this prickly, upright tree.

We think of the holly around the holidays but it’s just as important now, when it sweetens the air with its scent.

Catching My Breath

Catching My Breath

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So begins a long holiday weekend, last hurrah of the school year and opening salvo of summer. It is a delicious morning. Scrumptious. Meant to be eaten with a spoon. Or no, with a fork, slowly. Not slurped or inhaled but consumed mindfully.

On a go-to-office morning I would be encased in glass and masonry by now, shut off from the elements. All head, no heart. But today I’m at home, windows open, air flowing through the house. Birds outside, birds inside. Music everywhere.

Time for a long exhale. Very long. Then another, and another. The long winter is over. Time to catch my breath.

The Child in Spring

The Child in Spring

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“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”      —  George Eliot

I often think of these words, especially this time of year. In mid-May, childhood runs rampant. Kids frolic at the bus stop, forgo homework to dash outside the minute they get home from school. After dinner they ride bikes and scooters around the cul-de-sac. The end of the school year dangles tantalizingly in the future. It won’t be long now.

I caught this excitement the other day on a walk through the neighborhood. I inhaled it in the aroma of cut grass, felt it in the sun on my face. So many memories as I amble. Not even memories, but deeper than that. Sensory impressions. A whiff of juniper. The musty odor of a storm drain.

We forget how close to the ground we were in those days, how the earth rose up to meet us then with all its sounds and scents. But because it did, I can stroll through the world now with my middle-aged self — and the whole world comes alive again.

A Fluff Piece

A Fluff Piece

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For the last few days cottonwood fluff has been floating through the air. I think I know the source, a tree that’s half a block or so away. But every year at this time when the wind is right and the air is clear, I see its progeny.

So light, so fragile, yet tenacious enough to go the distance, it lodges itself in driveway cracks, leaf piles and sometimes even on the ground. It’s hard not to see it as wishes spun from the spring air, spores of hope.

I read about the tree, learn that it’s a type of poplar that does well in stressed soil. It became the official state tree of Kansas in 1937, the state legislature dubbing it “the pioneer of the prairie.”

Funny then to see it cast its seeds out onto the tidy, mulched lawns of suburbia. Perhaps we are the final frontier.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Grow Up

Grow Up

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Trees do it. Flowers do it. Even exasperating toddlers do it. But at this time of year it’s hard not to be thrilled by the sheer verticality of the green and growing world.

The climbing rose is a case in point. It grows up and out. Or over and out, depending upon how you look at it. And you’ll have to take my word for it, because this picture doesn’t capture it.

The point is, the branches grow out so the roses can grow up. Such is the power of the sun, of the life force.

May Day?

May Day?

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Here we are at May Day — sodden, squishy, water-logged. The petals of our dogwood, our Kwanzan cherries, scattered and beaten to the ground. Our airy forget-me-nots hardly the azure clouds they were three days ago. The azaleas hesitant, unwilling to bloom.

After this winter, I’d hoped for a knock-’em-dead spring. Something to warm and delight us. But nature doesn’t operate like that, I tell myself. Rain pelts and puddles — or fails to fall at all. Winds  funnel and destroy. Sometimes, snow even falls in spring.

The balance we seek, the recompense, is not in the natural world. If it is to be, we must supply it.

Heedless Birds

Heedless Birds

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The birds woke me this morning. Well, not really. But I was conscious of them at an early stage of awakening. I was thinking about their bravery. They have no choice but to be themselves. And that, as we know, is not always easy.

This time of year birds are heedless. It’s springtime and they’re taking chances. Bumping into windows, buzzing cars. They are high-wire artists, full of song and derring-do. They have mating on their minds, of course. They will stop at nothing to find their lady (or gentleman) loves. They may as well be deer dashing across the highway. But if I ran into a bird I wouldn’t dent the car.

So add to the list of spring marvels the madness (and madcapness) of birds. They flit, they soar, they perch on electric wires. They throw their slight bodies gladly into the world.

Dean’s Ravine Today

Dean’s Ravine Today

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Yesterday there were balmy breezes, scented air. The wind scattered petals over greening lawns.

Today it’s cold and snowy. The daffodils hang their heads. The red buds are coated in white.

It’s all part of the process, I know, two steps forward, one step back.

But it’s chilling — in more ways than one.

Mrs. Dean’s Ravine

Mrs. Dean’s Ravine

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Mrs. Dean has been gone more than two decades now, but her garden is still thriving — a legacy for its current owners (who have lovingly cared for it) and those who live nearby.

It starts off innocently enough: daffodils and forget-me-nots.

But it soon slopes down a steep hill into a bowl-shaped parcel studded with red bud and dogwood. It’s a secret garden, a natural ravine designed to look as wild as possible. I’m glad I could see it as it’s just coming alive to spring.