Spring comes to the neighborhood

The crabapple tree is going to have a great weekend.  I can see her through the burgeoning green of the maple in my side yard.  The crabapple sits in my neighbor’s yard, currently housing an assortment of songbirds who are shuttling back and forth to a local feeder.  But the tree is focused on what’s happening in her flowers, not on the birds.  Birds are secondary, irrelevant.  The pink is deep, almost red, lightening at the edges of buds so swollen that they seem about to burst. The day is sodden and cold, so the buds are just waiting, just gathering moisture and strength, awaiting the next time the sun makes an appearance.  When that happens, well, you better watch out!  The crabapple is going to bloom, with a no-holds-barred eroticism that will pull every bee in a county mile into her orbit.  Watch out!  That sensuous hot pink, the seductive perfume….the tree will be humming as you walk by, humming and buzzing with the activity of a thousand winged things, all frantically doing what they do and the tree herself will be regal, vibrant, basking in the pleasure, taking it all as her due, enjoying the brush of stamen on pistil, the dusting of pollen, the industry of bees, the enjoyment of human passers-by.  Oh, what a weekend she will have.

The sensuality of spring is everywhere.  Birds are loud and demanding.  The frogs in the little pond across the street spend every evening declaring their intentions. The onions and potatoes in my kitchen bins are insistent:  sprouts happen, they tell me, and spring cannot be denied.

I feel it, too.  I feel the urge to create, to make something new.  I dig my hands into the soil of the garden, watch my mind generate ideas, stir up a new recipe in the kitchen.  Long spring days that last well into the evening, warmer weather that draws one outdoors, the smells and sounds and skin sensations of spring….all beg to know, what will you make?  What will you create?  What will you bring to this season of growth and newness?

 

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