Spring

Winter evolves into Spring with the most dramatic and the most hopeful of changes. In the city, there are beautiful flowers and trees, but most of them have been specifically planted for the effect. Not that I don’t love seeing the gorgeous azaleas and flowering trees and popping flowers. I love them!

I’ve been through some long sad winters in my life, life changing seasons when I had to trudge through loss and hope I could make it into the next phase. But Spring always comes along to brighten my outlook. Always.

This year, I’ve had the lovely experience of driving a state highway at least once a week, making the changes in the countryside even more dramatic. One week there was snow, the first week in March. A couple of weeks later, I noticed the trees were fuzzy, small leaves pushing their way out. By the end of the month, we were having warm days, punctuated with the kind of clouds we watch explode in the sky, the ones that show the atmosphere is in turmoil and we have to watch carefully. The beauty of the massive clouds can easily turn into dark skies with swirling tornadoes dropping towards earth. A week after I see the leaves pushing at the ends of branches, I’m overwhelmed by the sense of the baby green colors of the trees around me as plant after plant shows its new colors.

Then the redbuds bloom in the forests, our state tree showing its colors, fuchsia and white, wild along the roadways.

The ground is turning from brown to green for the babies, calves and colts, that arrive. I drive into a mass of young green…the lacy profile of the branches from winter is filling in…

We still have wild skies and are enjoying a rainy season, needed for all that grows from the earth…The Cimarron River is filling and the trees along its bluffs are softer…I call this the “Sky Barn,” a place I see from the road at a country intersection.