When cooler evenings and warmer days begin to fill in the barren patches where winter grass would not grow, our walking group lapped up the light that cast a lime-greenness over our morning trek/sojourn this month. It is Spring, and the radiance from all the vigorous crisp growth is like no other we see any other time of the year.
Mother Nature unpacks newness, or maybe the other way around. She is no longer boxed, bottled or wrapped in cellophane by Earth but is triggered upward towards us like birthday candles from a God who wants to shower us with fireworks. How do you say thank you for the Sun we have waited for all winter, or for three-foot weeds that make us sneeze five times in a row, and the last few with embarrassed laughter? This is also a time when tide of winter litter becomes fodder for birds’ nests and the last leaves of last Fall are mulched up by an army of zero-turn mowers. One of those oversized commercial mowers flew by us at record speed and easily passed a sleek black BMW on Lincoln Avenue. At that speed the operator could barely hold onto the wheel (#Evansville), but he plowed ahead anyway with reckless abandon.
Perhaps no other time of the year but Spring does our conversation become so peppered with remarks about nature. We might grumble about health, jobs, and family struggles other times, but in the Spring, we talk of the newness, freshness and the blessings the earth is now presenting. The most well-known annual flowers trickled out of our discussions as well, but things got more complicated when we reached a Master Gardener’s path laden with hybrids and exotics. Nothing in that space stays dwarf for very long, and even the low growing sedums, awaiting more heat, were singing an opera at fever pitch.
Our this-and-that prattle was interrupted by the sounds our brains love more (according to research): that of wind, water, and birds. That sensory trifecta spoke to us as if a conductor had raised his baton and signaled an orchestra to prepare to play, and we, the audience, to be still. This Spring orchestra announced:
"Excuse me. Ahem. Pardon me. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s me over here. It’s me, Spring. I’m here, ready to start. I have something for you I think you are going to love to see. Can you smell it? Do you hear me?"
We did hear you, Spring, on our walk today. We saw you when a stark white head appeared high overhead in a bald eagle catching a draft. We smelled the fragrance of your long draping arms in an eighty-foot weeping Hemlock. We heard you squawking about your territory when an over-aggressive gander stretched out its nearby neck. Mother Nature was on. She left her mask behind and breathed on us anyway, and she scratched our senses with no restrictions or health warnings. We tried to catch up on our oh-so-important life details, but Spring is the strong quiet type, and had the last word on our BBRR pilgrimage.
Off in the distance there was a field of soccer preschoolers running helter-skelter, all playing the same position with uniforms that were grossly oversized. Their strategy seemed more like that at a piñata party rather than an organized sport, but the soccer kids didn’t care. And neither did we. Spring is nature’s party with no winners and no losers, just participants, and us few walkers.