It’s not just the red bud that blooms in red this time of year. Many trees are erupting in a frizz of scarlet. Red oak, maples, burning bush and others.
I snapped these tree buds out a window as they posed in front of a nice, neutral wall. But they’re just the beginning.
I look up, see a blur of pale color where stark branches used to be.
Spring begins slightly out of focus, as if our eyes can’t take too much at once.
I walk carefully through the meadow, choosing grass clumps and leaf piles and anything else that will keep the mud off my shoes. The snow and rain have saturated our soil; to walk on it now is to sink a little with each step.
Aren’t we all a little tender this time of year? Coats cast aside, jackets unzipped, the feel of the sun on newly bared skin. There’s a freedom but also a sensitivity.
So it is with the earth. Clover and fescue just starting to take hold. Even the lightest of foot falls leaves an imprint. I tiptoe to the trampoline to give the grass a chance. I watch with dismay as Copper scrambles after the ball, his every feint and skid leaving deep tracks in the mud. The yard is marked with our play.
But this tender time will pass, I tell myself. Even now new plants are anchoring themselves in the ground, their roots spreading. Soon they will weave a net, a home, a bulwark. Soon the land will be less impressionable. Until then, I’ll tread lightly.
Day before yesterday I stole an hour at lunchtime to walk the Cross-County Trail. I hadn’t been on it in months. This was the stretch closest to my house, less than 10 minutes away. I wasn’t sure it would be cleared of ice, and when it was, my feet flew!
The snow was piled high beside the path and rivulets of meltwater ran across the pavement. The sun was warm on my face and the Chieftains loud in my ears. From time to time a bird call or two broke through the music.
I wasn’t the only one out. There were dog walkers and solo wanderers and a group of three that took up the whole path.
“Passing on the left,” said a runner as he sped past by. “It’s good to be out today, isn’t it?” And it was. A hint of spring in the air and in our steps. The greening well hidden — but the promise of it all around us.
“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.
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)
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.
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.
I heard them last night, the tiny, vocal frogs we know as spring peepers. Their chorus is a sure sign of spring.
They’re late this year, the little guys. Waiting for warmth, I imagine. We all are.
But who among us makes such music of our contentment?
If I read about peepers (and I think I did long ago) I would learn that their sounds are mating calls — not some existential expression of delight.
Still, after a long winter, in the just-dark of a warm spring evening, existential delight is what I hear.
