The Frustration of Spring

Tomorrow is the first day of spring; my wife and I are still in Ohio (what were we thinking?). While the weather has exhibited signs of improvement, I get the feeling it has done so reluctantly, fighting the inevitable progression of the seasons tooth and nail, evidently feeling it's better to fight and fail rather than just give in. (Sounds like a case of pride, huh?)

For us, the end is in sight. We've taken a job in Montana which starts on the first of May. The first of May can't get here soon enough (and that's just wishing my life away).

We don't intend to sit around, waiting for April to get gone; we're going to bug out of Ohio by the middle the month and head south, toward Texas and the deserts beyond. We'll then swing north in California, drifting toward the coast, and return to the Pacific Northwest. We'll stop in Astoria, Oregon, pick up some stuff we left there in January, and continue on to West Glacier, Montana. We hope to see a lot of wildflowers and migrating warblers and hummingbirds along the way.

Again, we hope to see a lot of wildflowers and migrating warblers and hummingbirds along the way. The colorful little birds shouldn't be much of a problem; we'll be hitting southern Texas, New Mexico and Arizona at just the right time. It may be another story as far as the wildflowers are concerned.

At this moment, as I sit here at my computer, the sky so unfriendly and heavy with clouds it may just crash to the ground at any moment, Bluebonnets and Paintbrush are a house a-fire in Texas. Death Valley is currently experiencing what many are describing as the best wildflower bloom in history. Arizona and New Mexico ... I don't even want to think about what's going on down there.

The southwestern U.S., after all of that sometimes devastating rainfall over the winter, is now seeing the rainbow after the flood, only this time the colors are carpeting the ground as wildflowers. I'm afraid that by the time we get there all we'll see are spent flower heads and seedpods.

Certainly, with such a diversity of environments in California, we'll see lots of wildflowers there. We'll probably see some stuff east of the Cascades as well, and by the time we get to Montana we'll have had quite the spring fling. But in the meantime, suffering the lingering effects of winter in Ohio, knowing what's going on in the southwest, knowing we'll probably pull into town after the circus has moved on, it's frustrating.

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