Spring Has Sprung?
200 mm 1/400 sec f/5.6 ISO 140
Oh, March, how difficult it is to be your most ardent supporter. I try, I really do. It's spring, I say to disbelieving listeners. Look at the softening light, the lengthening of the daylight hours. Look at all the little tufts of grass popping up in the yard, getting greener and spreading their color across the sallow, sleepy ground with each sun-drenched day. Look at the wee buds, ready to sprout tiny leaves and blossoms on the redbud trees and the dogwood trees and my one and only peach tree. And look at the forsythia bushes lining the western edge of my yard, blossoming with small, delicate, yellow optimism.
But March is fickle and mischievous, too often determined to test my devotion. When March and Mother Nature decide in a given year to unleash a final winter blast of fury, there is nothing one can do about it aside from cowering in the house armed with flashlights and firewood and warm blankets in case one is thrown back to the 19th century. Last week's late-season nor'easter swept down the East Coast with macro-cyclonic glee, rattling my tin-roofed farmhouse for days with its damaging winds. When a tree came down on power lines in the normally tranquil field neighboring my two acres, it meant five miserable days-and four even more miserable nights-with no electricity. My small living room became survival central. Thank goodness for a wood stove and the heat it produces for that room. I could boil water in a kettle on that stove for tea so that all civilized living was not completely lost. There were too many days of chopping wood and cold feet and no running water-because the pump that pumps the well water into action can't do its thing without electricity- and very, very limited technology. Hours of playing board games are all well and good, but it ultimately becomes too forced, too this-is-all-we-have-for-fun-and-killing-time. It's like the books one is assigned to read for a tenth grade creative writing class; reading those books on a strict timetable pretty much kills the joy as opposed to reading those books during a languid, summer-will-never-end July. That is how one is supposed to read books.
Fully believing the dire meteorological warnings that humanity on the East Coast could blow away during the first weekend of March, I made sure to capture images of spring trying to assert itself. If people could be blown off their feet, then, surely, wee spring flowers could too. The crocuses, a lovely batch of white and yellow and purple that spread a tiny field of color outside the back door every year, were in full-bloom the last week of February. They are the first flowers in my yard to bloom, and every year a few new crocuses sprout and make themselves known in the tiny field. I was sitting in their midst on a mild afternoon and was about to head into the house when the bee showed up. He was clearly overjoyed with the discovery of the yellow crocus. He paid no attention to me. My hurried movements to lie on the ground and position my camera for the best shot I could get didn't deter him. Why should it? He was doing his thing, thrilled that winter was waning, and no pesky human was going to get in his way.
130 mm 1/100 sec f/4.8 ISO 400
The cluster of snowdrops along the driveway show up just after the crocuses. My snowdrops have never pushed through a layer of snow covering the ground as I would expect them to do; the crocuses, in fact, have done that when necessary. Maybe my snowdrops consider themselves too pristine, too small and white and pure and delicate to mess with the nuisance of snow on top of them. They are patient, they are deliberate in their timing. There is no rush to show off their arrival in the late-winter landscape.
165mm 1/320 sec f/5.3 ISO 140
Living next door to the snowdrops are a handful of early scillas (Siberian Squill). They are the most dainty of these end-of-February flowers, and I am a bit surprised they can push their way up through the heavy blanket of brittle leaves that I really should have cleared out by now. Dark purple-blue in color, they go all but unnoticed in their messy bed of old leaves. No more than three-inches tall, they are a fairy garden flower, very feminine, very sweet. They don't like much change in the late-winter, early-spring weather; they will call it a year quicker than the snowdrops and the crocuses if they are challenged.
200 mm 1/640 sec f/5.6 ISO 100
Finally, there are the blooms on the pieris shrub that sits outside my bedroom window. It is an evergreen shrub, and at this time of year it is covered in pendulous clusters of tiny bell-shaped flowers. It is a beautiful flowering shrub particularly in the morning light. My bedroom windows face the rising sun, and when I open the curtains on a lovely, bright morning, the delicate little bells are dancing in the breeze, translucent and soft in their appearance.
I'm hoping that March will decide to start behaving itself. I hope it has roared into this year with enough temperamental satisfaction as befits Leo rising in the heavens and winter releasing its grip. Maybe this year Persephone lingered a bit too long in the Underworld; maybe she packed her bags ready to head back to Olympus with her loving mother, and Hades convinced her to stay with him a little bit longer. Maybe. But Demeter needs to be happy and welcome her daughter back so she can start the six months of warmth and light and blooming flowers. It's time for spring; fall and winter will come around again soon enough.
