Another American Adventure: signs of spring

Thursday, April 7, 2011

signs of spring

We've had a lot of April Showers lately, but this morning there was a break in the weather. In our daily walk at Knob Hill Park the birds were chirping and we saw many signs of spring.

Most all of the trees and bushes are budding. Some with green buds, but the large trees have red buds.

From a distance, there is a lovely cast of red onto the brown hillsides.

And green things popping up everywhere out of the ground.

3 comments:

BarbaraApril 8, 2011 at 12:16 PM
We are maybe a week or so behind you. I noticed today that the lilac bush beneath my bedroom window is starting to bud. Spring arrives for me when the canopy above my street is a lovely, hazy green and the crabapples planted on the median beside the park a block away are in full blossom. Mind you, spring is also putting my clothes out on the line and I have done that twice this week! :)
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beth cioffolettiApril 9, 2011 at 10:23 AM
Ah, but to put clothes out on a line! Do you have one in your backyard or does it run from your window, like in city apartments?
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BarbaraApril 9, 2011 at 11:53 AM
It runs from the brick outside wall of my apartment, beside my back balcony (they often call them galleries around here -- must be derived from the French), to the telephone pole between properties. I don't have access to the yard because that belongs to the renter below. However, I do go down there to fetch fallen clothes pins or laundry. I don't have a dryer. During the winter, I hang stuff from a rack in my kitchen. Works for me and I splurged on a very sturdy rack last year.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.