Another American Adventure: spring colors

Friday, April 12, 2013

spring colors

There is just the faintest of pale spring colors that are appearing every where that you look these days. Peach and pale pink. Green dandelion leaves and grasses. Swamp cabbages proliferating along the banks of the stream. The winter brown of western Pennsylvania is slowly but surely giving way to color.

This is the drive home from the park ...

There is a beautiful while blossomed tree here, but just barely caught it while I was photo/driving.

2 comments:

BarbaraApril 12, 2013 at 1:27 PM
I love that hint of green in the canopy! Our sleet turned to wet snow and it is now "snaining". Should be knee deep in slush tomorrow.
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beth cioffolettiApril 13, 2013 at 11:24 AM
It's back down to the30s here ... But so far no snow or snain!
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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.