Just so you know

My Unitarian Jihad name is the Handgun of Thinking it Over. No Unitarians I ever met called one another Sister and Brother, so the generator can generate without me. I'll be happy to think over all your Sister or Brother , electronically generated names, though. Because that is the Unitarian way.

P.

Back to Phenology

I've written a lot of LJ entries in my head during the past few weeks. Their subject lines have included "Maple Flowers," "Chickadees," "The First Bat of Spring," "Bluejays, " "Flicker!" and "Motherwort, the prickly motherwort, will cover us all." You can imagine the kind of thing.

My first sign of spring this year was at twilight on that anomalously warm day a little before the last snowstorm. I opened my bedroom window and heard a robin singing, that immediately recognizable twilight song that brought back memories almost as powerfully as a scent might, all the cool spring evenings and the hot summer twilights and the last warm sunsets of fall. The second sign of spring was that the maple trees were blooming. I saw a white squirrel eating a series of fallen blossoms out of a lawn in my neighborhood. The third sign was that the motherwort came up. I should have dug it all up right then. I would still have had motherwort if I had done that, but perhaps in manageable quantities.

The next sign was chionodoxa and scilla blooming on south-facing slopes, and then suddenly there were scilla leaves in my yard, and then more suddenly they had buds with color, and now they are blooming. Just in the last two days, all over the bare mossy ground in the shady patches of our yard, the violet leaves are up, still half-curled. The wild geranium has come up among the motherwort, distinguishable by its smoother and sometimes spotty leaves. Lilies of the valley are already pushing their flower stalks up on the south side of the house, though on the north side there are not even any spears yet.. The two earliest patches of tulips have buds, though no color. In the meantime the winter aconite has just barely decided to emerge. One peony of five, snow-on-the-mountain, the first tiny leaves on mock orange and lilac bushes. And the elms are budding as red as red can be. I saw a sad sight from the bus window: a gigantic elm, in full red bud, hacked into pieces, frail upper branches still waving, lying in the mud, like a piece of Orthanc transplanted to Minneapolis. It had the orange markings of doom that indicate Dutch elm disease.

This evening there were three bats in the front yard. The first bat of spring was a businesslike bat, but these bats seemed positively giddy.

P.