Early Spring Beauty Surrounds Us

At twilight tonight, I came upstairs and looked out the windows onto a blue sky streaked with pink clouds with the entire scene reflected in the lake. I walked a few feet on into the kitchen to fix a hamburger for Gerald’s and my supper, and the reflection had already disappeared. Very soon the windows showed only the evening darkness, but I can still see that first lovely view in my head. There is so much spring beauty all around us this year that it is difficult to believe that winter may be over.

I have kept thinking we might have a March blizzard as we have some years in the past. Instead we had the tornado on the last day of February, which was much worse than a blizzard, but it only affected a minority of our population, which really does seem totally unfair.

I picked a lovely bouquet of daffodils by the roadside Monday for the women coming to our house that night to enjoy. We have some double daffodils and some paper whites that Gerald found back where the original Blumingstock house once was, but I have a strong preference for the dainty daffodil with the pretty delicate trumpet shape in the middle.

Although they were not yet ready to scent our living room on Monday night, the hyacinths Gerald planted are really strutting their stuff now. I need to bring a bloom or two inside since the daffodilm bouquet had to be thrown away today.

Bradford and Cleveland pear trees are abloom all over the region, and our redbud at the edge of the lawn is turning pinkish purple now. I told Gerald I wanted to see the Bradford pear trees on the opposite side of the tiny island he created in our lake, and so I was invited to join him and Jake for a ride around the farm in the Gator.

Several of our fields are still blackened from the recent burning required by the government program they are a part of. But already the cool season grasses are coming up green, and soon the warm season plants will join them for a healthy green cover once more. We found daffodils and paper whites on far fields across the road where a homestead used to be, and Gerald jumped off the Gator and dug up two clumps of the paper whites from the many there. He will add them to the bed where the rose bushes and hyacinths are.

The prettiest sight on that trip was a field our friend Bruce Beasley had told us about on Facebook. A large neighboring field was completely blue with thousands of small grape hyacinths. I had never seen that sight before and it was breath taking.

Gerald is still feeding the birds in the feeders on our deck even though it is totally unnecessary in this warm weather. We get a great deal of pleasure watching the colorful cardinals, woodpeckers, blue jays, brown headed cowbirds, red winged blackbirds, juncos, chickadees, sparrows, and some we cannot identify.

We used to have flocks of cardinals in our side yard at our other house, and during the ten years we have lived here we have missed them. Bruce, who lives in that same neighborhood, wrote about them this year. We have had so few that we’d get excited about a rare single one that might show up on our deck. Imagine our delight after Bruce wrote about them to suddenly have a small flock show up at Woodsong. They light in the redbud and fly back and forth to the feeder making our feeder the most colorful it has ever been.

The kids in our school systems have been on spring break this week, and David took Sam on a jazz trip to Memphis and New Orleans. So I have visited with Katherine a little more than usual while they’ve been gone. For weeks I have enjoyed the early crocus beside her front walk. Then more recently her tiny miniature daffodils started blooming, and they are a sweet delight. (I have never seen these any place else.) Now her lovely larger daffodils are blooming too. She has had several appointments this week, so she has been able to enjoy them also as she has been out and about.