A Walker in the Suburbs

After an early bloom and an untimely freeze, I didn’t expect much of Spring this year. But it has surprised me. The hyacinths are wafting, the lilacs are trying (I have three blooms this year, up one from last year) and the dogwood, well, it’s something else entirely.

I remember when we would have four or five flowers on this tree. And now, it has burst into life and threatens to overcome the mailbox if there isn’t some judicious pruning.

Until there is, here’s the shaggy, unruly tree in all its gleaming,white 2017 glory.

Trotting down the road this morning I looked to my right, at the trees just greening in the forest. Little leaves still so young, so tender. They were shining with the effort and the touch of early light.

Maybe it was the music playing in my ears at that moment, a string trio by Mendelssohn, or maybe it was the release of a work week’s tension, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by the bravery of those leaves, by the work of redemption they perform every spring.

Of course, there’s a biological explanation for what they do. I vaguely remember it from high school biology class.

But for me, the biological becomes the metaphorical, just as the walk becomes the lodestone, the anchor of a day.

When I returned here late Sunday from Lexington, I could tell that spring hadn’t gotten much further than it was when I left three days earlier. And no wonder: Virginia had the same cold rain and snow bursts over the weekend that Kentucky did.

Which means that spring is delightfully long this year. The trees, just greening, are paused at a precious and delicate moment. For some, too much cold now means no blooms later on. The hydrangea comes immediately to mind.

For others, though, the cooler temperatures mean a slower greening — a longer run of “spring green,” a Crayola color I remember from childhood. It’s a hue closer to yellow than to green. “Nature’s first green is gold,” Robert Frost said. “Its hardest hue to hold.”

Some years, that “hardest hue to hold” lasts only hours; other years it might linger for a few days. This year it’s going on a week — a slow greening that’s a long tease and a rare treat. It’s all I can do not to aim my camera at every leaf and tree.

Looking at the springtime miracle, watching it unfold. What I notice every year — and most certainly have written about here before — is how it starts at the top.

Those uppermost branches, the ones that scrape the sky and soak up the sun, they are the first to bud. Everything else follows in kind.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, metaphorically speaking (and — given that I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in Intro Biology — that’s the only way I can speak). Flowers, plants, crop, they all grow from the ground up. But blooming starts at the top and works its way down.

There has to be message here somewhere.