Ghostwater Garden

Sweet Crabapple

The crabapple a few days ago:

And today:

The air smells as sweet as honey.

We are in the Greening

Every year, spring creeps to Michigan.  I watch the trees, waiting for the buds to swell. And then suddenly - all at once it seems - it's there. The green.  The tiny leaves coming forth from the trees, the maples blooming, the crabapples sending out fat buds. It's a cacophony of color up there, but so few notice.  Our eyes are hold low to the ground, feasting on crocus, and squill, watching the daffs rise up. 

My neighbor's house, and the trees.  Look at all the colors there!  The dark spires of the evergreens, the acid yellow of the willow, the orange maple blooms lit incandescent by proximity.  And in front, the burgundy of new leaves on the crabapple, pink buds sparkling. 

It's amazing. 

Redbud leaves (Cercis canadensis)

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

(Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Frost)

I'm going to miss the birds here.

Song sparrows.  Chipping sparrows.  Chickadees.  Bluebirds. Goldfinches. Northern Orioles. Hummingbirds.  Sandhill cranes.  Redwinged blackbirds.  Nuthatches.  Woodpeckers.  Sapsuckers.  Hawks: Sharpshinned, Cooper's, Redtailed, Redshouldered. 

It has been quite an adventure, living in a semi-rural area.  Muskrats groggily stumbling through the yard in spring.  Voles on the sunporch.  The skunk eating the windfallen fall apples.  Displaced deer on their way to being road kill somewhere, the year they developed the swampy land south of here. Two fuzzy racoons in the sycamore tree, eating last year's seeds.   

Toads and frogs and garter snakes. 

Some of the birds will be everywhere I might move to.  Crows.  Grackles.  Bluejays.  Cardinals.  Robins.  Mourning doves.  The ubiquitous outsiders: English sparrows, House finchs, and the Starlings. 

The rest of nature's broad brush?  I don't know.  It will depend on where we end up.  But I will miss this.  This little corner lot, in an area where the wild is still around, in farmer's fields and the few overgrown woodlots that were once fields.  Soon to be developed.  All of it going away to grass and pavement and condos. 

I'm moving back to pigeon territory.  Ugh.  That alone is enough to make me melancholy.