colorado spring, guest blog by bonniebythepeak
I’m a bit jealous of Robin’s pictures of flowers and ducklings. The world in those images is green. I live at the point where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains, and breathtaking grandeur is the norm. I’m in awe of the ruggedness, but what I miss is the green.
There are these rocky bluffs near my house, and if you climb one and look out over the city, the landscape’s quite yellow and punctuated with bundles of brown sticks. (They can’t be trees, these naked, budless things.) Over the course of the winter, everything gets homogenized into a dreary, silty gray. February fades into March, and I wait with itching eyes for the green to appear.
Then Spring comes, and we get snow. You read that right. Snow. I think that Spring in Colorado is just the byproduct of Summer and Winter duking it out from March to May. We can have snow anytime in there. Or rain. Or eighty degree weather.* Spring has clearly chosen to abdicate her authority and let the other seasons squabble over her months.
Either that or she’s fickle.
I can see Spring’s eyes opening one morning in late April. She sits up, dreamlike, and says, “I think I’m tired of gentle rain showers. Let’s start today off with a foot of snow. Heavy, wet stuff hurtling groundwards in thick clumps. Oh, and a couple tornadoes will round out the afternoon nicely. Where’s my tea?”
I’ve lived in Colorado for twenty-eight non-consecutive years. I love Spring. I’d go crazy if I didn’t. I love the guessing game insanity of it. I love getting up in the morning wondering if I’ll need a tee shirt, a sweater, or a raincoat that day. Or all three. I love not knowing if I’ll be driving home in pouring sleet or under clear starry skies.
And I love the moment when everything changes. One week it’s all drab and dusty and sere, and the next, tulips are galloping out of the ground, and the pear trees are popcorning into full white-blossomed glory.
Right around this time, the trees surrounding my house get whipped awake by the blowing of the Zephyr. There’s this olive tree who’s a gnarled old lady of a thing, and she’s always the first to push silver green leaves from her twisted fingers. No sooner is she budding, than she’s having a go at my truant lilacs until they begin to bloom. Nearby is a tall gray maple tree that still hasn’t put forth a single bud. I’ve caught Olive more than once tapping Miss Maple on her branches and saying, “Get a move on, you! What will the neighbors think?”
It’s a good thing Olive can’t see the Acacia twins out front. They’re not only the first to lose their leaves in Autumn, but they’re the last to bud in Spring. I can’t decide if the Acacias are lazy or if they just spent more time in tree college going to parties than on studying for their exams in Leafing 101. If Olive knew, she’d be sniffing reprovingly and whacking them about the trunk with any limb long enough to reach. Probably best that the house separates them.
Still, even if I have a few unclad gray sticks masquerading as trees, it doesn’t matter because it’s Spring, and at long last my eyes aren’t so green-starved. Yesterday, I stepped onto the little concrete square that’s not quite a porch in front of my forest green door.** Birdsong swept over me in delicious little trills and flutters, and the golden buds on the aspens pushed themselves out until one after another they became pale green leaves chock-full of chlorophyll and photosynthesizing magic.
And there I stood, imbibing it all. As I looked from my greening lawn to the thousands of tiny leaves on my burning bushes to the towering peaks in the west that inspired the line “for purple mountain majesties,” a smile sprouted deep inside me and blossomed across my lips. I felt giddy in that so-sorry-but-I-can’t-stop-these-bubbles-of laughter kind of way. You know the feeling. It’s like when you’re in eighth grade and someone passes you a note that says, “Yeah. He totally likes you.”
To my twitterpated*** eyes, everything is resplendent. Dandelion and primrose, spruce and elm, all glow with the romance of rebirth. I will relish every pollen-laden breath, and wherever you may be, I hope there are all things green and growing nearby. Happy Spring!
Today’s forecast: mild temperature, thunderstorms, and snow. No joke.
* Fahrenheit, of course.
** I painted the door green long ago in a fit of verdant longing.
*** From Disney’s Bambi. Twitterpated means “completely enamored of someone or something.” Although I think an alternate definition could be “having an unhealthy obsession with the social networking site known as Twitter as indicated by a compulsion to refresh your page every five seconds to see if someone you follow has updated their status or responded to the brilliantly witty remark you just posted to @famousmucketymuck.”
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