Spring has finally arrived. It has been getting very warm and then very cold and then very warm again over the past weeks, but that is not the indicator I look to. I look to the trees to tell me about rebirth and new life. And they have been. Over the last couple of weeks the tips of their branches have been deep red with tiny buds, portents of what was to come. And then last week the smallest of green leaves began to unfold.
On Tuesday, we had some driving around to do on a grey rainy day, and it was then that I realized that Spring is here. Grey and chilly, with a soaking rain, the kind that makes you want to stay inside and read all day, the kind that magnifies bright colors, somehow, and makes them stand out. And that is what happened, of course, with the leaves. They are all that callow spring green, the kind that you can only make by adding just a touch of sap green to a lot of hansa yellow light, if you are trying to make it on a pallet, that electric spring green that is full of hope and promise and that thinks it will never, ever fade into the world-weary heavy green of late summer, though we know it will. The trees know this, too, but are tight-lipped, enjoying the optimism of the new leaves and sighing with joy as the wind catches them and waves their branches, yoga for an eighty year old maple.
Up Hope Street is Lipitt Park, which is a riot of trees all showing off their new spring attire. In the grey rain it was just stunning, making me stop the car and hold the camera out the window, shielding it from the rain with my hat. Of course, in the photo the colors get lost, I can not photograph magic like this with something as paltry as a point and shoot, but you maybe get the idea.
On Tuesday, we had some driving around to do on a grey rainy day, and it was then that I realized that Spring is here. Grey and chilly, with a soaking rain, the kind that makes you want to stay inside and read all day, the kind that magnifies bright colors, somehow, and makes them stand out. And that is what happened, of course, with the leaves. They are all that callow spring green, the kind that you can only make by adding just a touch of sap green to a lot of hansa yellow light, if you are trying to make it on a pallet, that electric spring green that is full of hope and promise and that thinks it will never, ever fade into the world-weary heavy green of late summer, though we know it will. The trees know this, too, but are tight-lipped, enjoying the optimism of the new leaves and sighing with joy as the wind catches them and waves their branches, yoga for an eighty year old maple.
Up Hope Street is Lipitt Park, which is a riot of trees all showing off their new spring attire. In the grey rain it was just stunning, making me stop the car and hold the camera out the window, shielding it from the rain with my hat. Of course, in the photo the colors get lost, I can not photograph magic like this with something as paltry as a point and shoot, but you maybe get the idea.
Then yesterday I made the drive (lot of driving lately. Maybe this is something I should examine) out to Syracuse again. All the way through the mountains Ii drove under a flat-bottomed roof of cumulonimbus clouds, the kind that are piled high like grey whipped cream with flat bottoms like they are sitting on a pane of glass, pregnant with rain, though I saw very little rain on the trip. As I got higher in the mountains, of course, I drove backward through spring, back to the very first little buds on the trees, and then as I came down the other side I got to watch everything unfold in fast- motion, the car a speeded up camera recording what a friend called “the white-hot electric sex” of spring.
On the other side of the mountain, the clouds started to part a little. The blue dome never looks so blue as when see through grey clouds, and the spots of sunshine hitting the ground seemed that much warmer and joyous for the grey up above. By the time I stopped at a turnout by the Erie Canal, there was enough sun that I could eat my sandwich at a picnic table made of grey recycled plastic without a jacket on, warm and happy and comforted by the history flowing on the other side of the chain link fence. As I sat there in the sun a CSX freight train rolled ponderously by on the other side of the Canal, the same company that sponsors our NPR station, and I smiled as I thought about their claim that they move a ton of freight three hundred miles on a gallon of fuel. It made me think of home, where Karen and our unborn son are, and about the season of birth and renewal and joy in my own life.
Canals and trains, and sunshine and spring. Better than Christmas.
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