Signs of Spring

I think that the first real sign of spring is the smell in the air. Unfortunately, we don't yet have "smell-o-vision", so I have to try and describe it. Its almost like the smell of straw, or hay in the hot sun, but with a hint of pine. It's like when you were a kid and went inside a clean barn, not a cattle/horse barn that smelled of animal poop (although, in the right circumstances, that isn't an altogether awful smell.)



This is a comforting smell. It's the hot sun, a sign that we made it though another winter, that hot sun beating down on the dry earth. It kind of reminds me of being a kid again, and lying on a straw bale, thumping it and watching the chaff rise and spin in the hot sun. I don't think I ever actually did that, but if I did, then the smell of that and the smell of today were the same.

The second sign is the new buds on the trees and the spring flowers. The purple crocuses were out a week or two ago, over the Easter weekend, but it was so rainy and windy and cold that I didn't take pictures. Today I could hunker down and get close so that you can see the fuzzy stalk and the almost sparkly purple lines on the petals. Enlarge the picture!

The yellow flower is like a buttercup, but not quite. It has a shiny surface that gleams in the sun.

I love the way these flowers just burst out of the earth, not in a cultivated and well fertilized bed, but they just push their way through the dead pine needles and old branches, and struggle to face the sun. Nature is quite a marvel.

Are there some things in your life that happened, but it wasn't until later that you realized the significance of those things?For me, marriage and childbirth are the ones that stand out the most to me. I knew they were important days, but I didn't realize how important until much later. I just couldn't see the big picture yet. I probably still only see a fraction of the picture, but I know that I see more of it today than when they actually occured.

There are many, many roads we travel down as we go through life. And pretty regularly, we come to a fork. We make a choice, not knowing the significance of that choice until we've come to the end of that particular road. We often wonder if we can go back and choose differently because the fork we chose didn't turn out like we'd hoped. But because no one has made time travel accessible, we just have to live with our choices and hope to choose more wisely the next time we encounter a fork.

Before

In this picture you can see the three healthy shrubs in our yard. They are about 28 years old and just starting to get sort of unruly and frazzled. The deer have also decided that they make a delectable midnight snack.

After

And in this picture you can see the sad demise of the shrubs. Actually, not so sad, they have pretty much lived their shrub-lives and are ready to go to shrubbery heaven. We (and by "we", I mean "he") built a nice railing instead, and I plan to hang a few baskets of flowers. Out of deer reach. You can see the difference a year has made in the poor shrubs, they started to die off very quickly, and we just decided it was time for a change. Mid-house crisis, so to speak.