Every day is the earth’s birthday. The largest peony plant, though still uncurling, already sports ten small planets midwived by ants.
A scarlet bough at the woods’ edge: I peer through binoculars at the first red maple keys. Deer straggle by in their ragged spring coats.
Sun filtered by thin cirrostratus clouds. The hawk’s shadow is soft as a squirrel’s tail, but it still sets off all the alarms.
What makes the spring peepers start calling in the middle of a morning, with sun so strong I can see the faint pollen filming the floor?
The French lilac whitening into blossom, its once-smooth profile smashed by last October’s snowstorm, finally looks wild against the woods.
A brief blaze of sun through a hole in the clouds. The bridal wreath bush is in full bloom, measuring the wind with stiff white fingers.
The mayapples next to the creek have opened their umbrellas. We do need rain. Already, the top branches of the crabapple have caught fire.
Squirrels grapple on a skinny branch 20 feet up. One falls to the ground with a loud plop and races off, sun shining through its tail.
Thick ground fog, one degree below freezing. The trees grow sharper as the sun begins to blur. Please don’t flower yet, I tell the oaks.
At 8:02 a patter of rain too brief to even darken the sidewalk. Nuthatch, field sparrow. A crow bleats like a lamb with a hand on its neck.
The Cooper’s hawk swoops down from the woods’ edge into the ditch and dips his beak again and again in its cold clear blood.
A groundhog among the daffodils rears up on its haunches like the very large squirrel that it is. A tiger swallowtail careens past.
Drifts of white on the springhouse roof: not fallen blossoms, but last night’s pellet snow. Tree creaks join the dawn chorus.
Time has slowed again with the return of cold weather. The bleeding-hearts in my garden are huddling on half-grown stems.