Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature-- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.- Rachel Carson

When I was younger it seemed to behoove me to gripe about winter and it's many uncomfortable facets. But as I've grown older my opinion of the season has changed. I even enjoy walking in the snow on those frigid days when the snow underfoot squeeks from the extreme cold. I even find a perverse sort of joy in the coldness of my automobile as I'm waiting for the engine to warm up and generate enough heat for the heater to work it's slow but certain magic before I reach my destination.

It's the certainty of change that is appealling to me. When the season seems to become intolerable, it will change. The most wonderful of all the seasons will be upon us in a little over two months. That season of renewal, in the reawakening of nature, the expanding of our world so to speak. We will start all over again the attempt to harness our little portion of the world into what we perceive as the perfect lawn or garden, and begin our battle that I personally seldom win with the noxious weeds. It's a battle I am prepared to lose, but for a while the battle is joined, me against nature, until, of course, nature wins. It's preordained.

While I spin my wheels in that annual battle I will have the game to spend my evenings with. The game? Baseball of course.

My wife will devote much of her time to growing the perfect tomato, and planting the latest show flower in her never-ending quest for the final piece of the flowergarden. It won't be the best because that would end the quest, the experimenting, the fun of it all. After all that's what it's all about, isn't it?

A stray thought ran through my head a few days ago. I was sitting on my porch gazing at the new arrivals in my wife's flower garden enjoying the sights and the warm lazy sunlight when to paraphrase the Lone Rangers radio introduction, out of the blue came the thought, It'll be nice when winter returns and the air is brisk and cool breezes blow. Now where in the devil did that thought come from? I think after careful and laborious research I decided it must be an age related thing. In a way it is I think, it certainly has a lot to do with retirement. When you're retired you can decide when you want to leave your house and venture out into the weather elements of the moment. Remember when you were working and you would look out the window to see if the weather had gotten better, and it hadn't. What you would have given if only you could have taken off your tie and poured yourself another cup of coffee and forgotten about venturing out today, maybe tomorrow.

Well in retirement that little piece of wishfulness works. You can pick your day or time to venture out. Thus winters no longer hold dread for me. If it's too bad I stay in. That is why winters have become a season not to cringe thinking about, but a season to enjoy whenever you want.

Spring is here, the sun is shining, the temperatures are getting into the seventies some days, and the birds and bees, and frogs are doing that thing. I felt like a voyeur when taking some pictures of this and that when whoops I interrupted frogs doing what I never really cared to be in the front row for. But that's the way it is on this day in May, as Walter Cronkite used to say. I took a very small video of a moving stream with a bird singing in my impression of Charles Kuralts old Sunday Morning show, when he would show a nature video to end his shows. Bear with me, it's the first I've taken, it may get better, can't get worse as they say.

Goodbye winter. I am not psychic, but I think we've seen the last of this kind of stuff for a while. But as you can see, we were a little too optimistic a few weeks ago and moved some of the summer stuff out before it was time, to quote an old Orson Wells commercial.

Spring has arrived and I'm still alive. As you can see, springtime brings out many diverse feelings in me. One is, thank God, I survived the winter. (although winter this year was not too bad) The other and most prevalent is that I am thrilled to see another spring arrive. It is a time of renewal in thought and deed. The deed is the opportunity to toil again in the gardens. Change will be the operative word this spring again; changes in the landscape is in the offing. It's almost an annual springtime rite. Just when it's agreed that we will do no more but maintain and enjoy, the demons of being a Gemini invade my wife's soul and what was once a landscape complete is no more. Change, that is the keyword again. I will once again accept the role of field hand, and dig, and chop, and pry, and relocate, and prepare the earth for seedlings or brick, to follow a plan percolating in the mind of my resident Gemini. I will in future editions expound in greater length about the changes and about Gemini's in general.


"Spring is a heart full of hope and a shoe full of rain."


-- Unknown

ANOTHER SIMILAR QUOTATION:

Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.
Doug Larson

OR THIS BY ME WHICH KIND OF DESCRIBES MY AREAS SPRING THUS FAR:

RAIN


Rain, rain and more rain
a week of rain.
Will it stop today?


Through winters snows and ice
I waited
knowing that the sun would free me.


Not yet.