I was focused on lunch at Sue’s Diner when I almost ran into Spring.
I was making my way up the street from my office, and halfway noticing the windows of the stores. I admit to being rather old fashioned, and I always look forward to seeing folks display their pride in their towns with window displays.
At a stoplight, I glanced at a friend’s shop – Miss Priscilla always has the nicest windows in Whiteville – in hopes of finding a new spring dress for my wife. I noticed two mannequins in the window; one had a potential candidate for an early Easter present, while the other was dressed more casually. I did note that the second mannequin was standing at kind of an odd angle, and had long strawberry blonde hair.
The light changed, I took my foot off the brake, and I almost wrecked as the second mannequin moved.
Obviously, it was just sweet Priscilla adjusting part of the display, but I almost took out a utility pole because she was getting ready for spring.
There is always more spring to be found in the country than on the streets, and our place is no exception. We must have had an unusually warm winter, since the irises are competing with the jonquils and daffodils for first rights to bloom. Some of our old, old azaleas have already budded as well as the ancient dogwoods that once rocked in the wind of the railroad, its tracks now long gone and replaced with pine, scrub oak, gum and tulip poplar, held together with wild grapes that have just begun to send out the first tentative tendrils scouting for spring.
Melanie and Taliana are sleeking up after a long winter of hay, grain and dreams of green, nibbling a smorgasbord of grass, early clover, and stalks of coastal Bermuda whose seeds somehow survived being harvested, baled and eaten over the winter months. The green stuff is determined to outlast my equines, and every day, it grows a little wider, a little taller. My goats spend half the day continuing their battle with the morning glories and vines in their pen, just as the plants continue to threaten to retake the old swingset that offers safe harbor to any climbing flower that can make it to the top.
The quivering owls – Eastern Screechers – are out in abundance at our place this year, filling the dusk and dawn with their eerie little cries, romantic songs that can only be understood by those tiny but terrible little predators. Their cries irritate but don’t frighten the geese, two of whom zealously guard their precious nests that will soon give way to fuzzy goslings that will be protected by a phalanx of hissing, snapping, flogging, feathery dinosaurs. Our geese are of several different colors and breeds, but there is no color barrier when it comes to protecting the young. I wish more people had that attitude.
A friend came by to help me with some chores Saturday. As the day warmed and went on, our rest breaks began to more closely resemble naps, at least when Bruce and Jack didn’t think we were excellent candidates for whatever puppy-dog game was being played at that moment. The games generally involved playing tug-of-war with whatever was handy, and licking the humans’ noses. A good time was had by all.
It was extraordinarily tempting to sit there in the sunshine and nap a little. I refuse to confirm or deny that I might have done just that.
Spring was in full force as I took the long way home from church Sunday; mounds of jonquils and trails of daffodils marked walkways and drives where homes once stood. The dogwoods and the Bradford pears were competing in a beauty pageant. A grumpy, ungrateful pony I once helped get back into his pen was rolling in the sunshine. A grandfather was walking both his dog and his grandson. The dog was loose, but the toddler was on a leash. It seemed an eminently reasonable practice to me, and all three looked happy as happy could be.
Further up the road, an earnest young man of about eight was practice casting in the front yard. Since there was a boat attached to a truck, and other fishing gear in evidence, I got the feeling he was wishing the grownups would hurry up, since time was wasting and they had fish to catch.
Even the nights seem different as spring greens and gleams. As I went outside for the last livestock check of the evening, the stars were still sharp as in winter when there’s no humidity, but they didn’t seem as cold as before. A few early moths were desperately courting in the porch light. Far off, I heard a coyote give a lonely social bark, then a big dog telling the interloper to shut up and mind his own business. Melanie was snoring in that way that donkeys have, and Bucky the Goat gave a quiet, but inquisitive baaaah, as if to tell me to be careful not to wake up the children.
Another sign of spring was when Miss Rhonda got her first baby squirrels in the other day; they opened their eyes right on schedule Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We almost always get the first squirrels of the rehab season after a March wind blows the remains of February and winter into memory, and these two mean this year is no exception.
In a few weeks they’ll graduate to Pecan School, and by the start of summer they’ll have forgotten their humans as they make their own places in our colony. The big dark eyes will eventually see humans with fear, but right now, while their tails are still slick, they see only someone who cares enough to feed them every two hours, cuddling them in the spring sunshine.
An old dog sleeping in the sun; bunches of daffodils swaying as traffic blasts past en route to a barely-warmed beach; my porch birds frantically building a nest to replace the one knocked down by last fall’s rain; seemingly bare patches of black earth cracking open as seeds sprout and a garden grows – the signs of spring are everywhere.
Despite my love of the bitterest cold of winter, nothing warms my heart like running into Spring and its dreams of green.
