Sunday, May 1, 2011

Ahh... Spring!


So this is my first 'Spring' season after retiring. It turns out it's a pretty busy little season.

This
year I got to help my wife, Deb, with all the work that she usually did herself for, lo, those many years since I was always at work, doing whatever it was that I did. Gosh, that was an awful, run-on sentence. I'm surprised the blog police didn't shut me down.

The first thing we did was to clear away all the snow. That was a pretty good trick because there toward the end there was no place to put any more.

But then there was yard clean-up, tool sharpening and maintenance, re-doing the bed-edging, taking down the netting that kept the damned deer from eating everything we ever planted. Those deer are a menace, I tell you! Homeless people could eat them, you know, deer and Canadian geese, the homeless would never go hungry.

Returning to Spring... then we re-set the rocks lining the paths we had put in the woods, had the guys put down new wood chips on the paths, the chips came from all the deadfall the trees contributed over winter. We're very green, we recycle everything! Deb then vacuumed the woods and polished the trees, and then we moved all the plants a few inches to the left to get them just right. But it was all worth it as the new growth came in.

We only lost one tree over the winter and some of the heavy ice split a few of our Dragon Lady evergreens. But they're healing nicely. That is what Spring is for.

Look how carefully the downed tree managed to thread itself through the other trees so as not to damage any of his friends. See? That's why Deb polishes the trees, they just slide off one another in case one of them falls.

So, here are a few photos of Spring around the house. It's my favorite season, rebirth, second chances... all that. It could be because growing up in Miami we didn't have this kind of Spring. I don't think I even realized a lot of trees flower in the Spring until I moved up north. In Miami there's a wet season and a dry season and if a tree flowered, it pretty much always flowered. It's a little like a different planet up here.






And if you're the observant type (you must be, otherwise you wouldn't be bothered to read this 'blog') this last photo is the Spring version of the snow scene I included at the beginning of this post. And that's why I'm so glad it's Spring! Yay!