Spring, not to be Denied

Sun-lovers move where the sun, in an opinion like my own, overwhelms a typical daytime sky, and in temperate zones they're apt to bemoan every cloudy delay to the green season, often including the rainy spells that signal the buds to open. A few of us, who define ourselves as odd, scruffy, wolvish in our orientation to the wild and natural most of the time, but clad in a stack of shirts, knits and jackets, secretly delight in the shivering of the bare bushes even if we curse the sea-borne winds that bite our hands and make us grab gloves even in May, because a heat-baked outdoor scene to us feels loud as if light from the sun could be heard shrieking or roaring; we have to get away to where the sounds are fainter and movement slower and tentative in response to other movement, sensed or suspected. Still, we cold-weather types freeze and peer, crouched low or standing tall, awed by any number of springtime discoveries. 

Yesterday, these wild cherry buds were breaking open, tight and yellow-green.

Nearby a noise overhead stopped me in my stride--a mechanical stutter like some bygone hand-held tool with a couple of moving parts, something small and steely and something heavier with a grinding clatter. One merlin, small and extra-nimble like something shot out then retracted by an elastic cord, was besieging a crow where the road led between trees and river's mouth. The crow made the low clatter, the falcon jingled. Apart and together, apart and back together, swinging more and more to one side, the siege continued, antics and face-offs a hallmark of  the motives of spring's general awakening.

Later that day, indoors in the call center where I work, I was remembering hepaticas from last week-end, in woods an hour by car to the northwest, isolated whitish blue-violet outbursts from brown leaf litter, barely offset by any first sprigs of green anywhere on the ground or above. The leaves stood apart from from the flowering stalks, old-green with red tinges, lobe-shaped like a liver.

All these seem precursors to the leafburst and the months of summer. Late as this spring has been,  when it arrives we have a menu of items to call to mind, observe, harvest and protect. Here is a set of spring floral note cards for sending your thoughts or for using wherever you can use them.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/96314046/spring-flowers-card-set-of-6-peonies?