The Garden of the Seasons: Birds and Plants Remind Us That the Earth Is Still Turning, Even If We're Kind of Stuck

Let's do something hands on.   Let's look at the evidence

all around us, the birds, and plants and trees are doing their jobs, right on schedule. 

Let us take off the heavy gloves of social caution and put on the work gloves, the ones with holes in the fingertips. These holes are pre-installed, free of cost, thanks to heavy use last year, and probably the year before that. 

                The Covid pandemic is real enough. But pandemic and springtime are separate empires of thought, incommensurable ideas, maintaining their own quite borders. 

                I confess to voting for Spring, for all its routine disappointments. And yet today's forecast for a cold, blustery, partly-cloudy day turned into a cool, breezy and ecstatic celebration of sunny skies, a sublime background for occasional flotillas of fair weather, cottony clouds, turned into an unexpected Mother's Day bonanza. 

                Springtime's poll numbers go up and down regularly with the standard fluctuations in the weather, but on the whole I am a firm supporter, casting party line approval for April, May and June. Arguably, June is summer, and I am always happy to arrive there, but feel no need to rush through the early floats in this luxurious parade through the season of hope and renewal. 

             Already, April's bounty floats down to the pavement.

The trees weep blossoms, open-faced white like those on our weeping cherry. The promising pink buds curled tight as shuttered lips on wild cherry in the woods we walk now have opened and ornament the trails. 

The young street trees turn the skyline lemon-lime with fresh new leaves. While their heavy forbears show tiny blossom, catkins, or bare branches against the deep blue skies.

          In the front and backyard gardens, dried leaves and wintry grasses give way to new greens: and to the Japanese Primrose in the top photo on this page; the reliable spring bloomer Bleeding Heart; the Hellebores (Lenten Rose); and in the final pic at the bottom of the page with the oddly delightful name of Spring Vetch.