Now, what you do or don't do is, as always, your own perrogative. It all has to do with priorities and, believe me, I find it just as hard as the next person to juggle my priorities to include everything I'd like to wedge-in every week. In this case our topic is time-valued information. Another week has already passed.
Tick... Tick... Tick... Tick...
What’s this all about? Well. as I was just saying to Diana, I'm already experiencing what I call my annual "Spring Anxiety". You see, there's a brief, maybe a week to ten day, period every spring when everything starts happening in the woods around here... and I think it’s already getting underway.
We’ve already largely missed sap-taking time and the old Italian immigrants would have started reaping the dandelion greens before they bloom and become tough and more bitter.
Around here, Coltsfoot is often the first alert. Everywhere along the sunny roadsides and dirt heaps we start seeing its little yellow dandelion-like blooms atop those dragon-scale like stems. Shortly, something magical will be afoot in the shade of the suburban and rural woodlands. The Bloodroot, Toothwort and Spring Beauties will start popping up and soon the slopes of the darker woods are covered with Trilliums. On years of special blessings there are even Morel mushrooms to be taken hereabouts, honest.
This all starts rather suddenly and is, to me, a very holy time. I need to be out-there to witness it - - to take it in spiritually, reconnecting and reconciling with its actuality. Now living completely in the city I already feel like I am less cued to the timing and now in a greater state of peril for missing it.
The problem is that it's very easy to miss, ensconced in our humdrum of "right-now”-”oh-so important’" priorities. It just doesn't wait for us to get around-to encountering it. One or two diversions can intervene and " poof ! " -we've missed it.
It usually happens in the first half of April and long ago I started marking it every year on my calendars. With our sudden leap from months of sub-freezing temperatures to 60 and 70 degree days, it may even start earlier this year.
The hills are calling and the springs are already running hard.
This year, LETS DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT !
-Earrach
I've been missing the spring ephemerals for a couple of years now. I'm trying to go for a walk somewhere beautiful at least once a week this spring!
ReplyDeleteLast year I posted to the ADF-Naturalists list an early-Spring watch to get folks to report in with their observations and zipcodes so anyone interested could check the general locale with Google Maps... I better get started if I'm posting it this year - the southerners probably have gotten the jump on us! - Earrach
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