No Time to Leave Ohio: Day 1, Back on the Road

Mid-April's no time to be leaving Ohio. Winter's fingertips have finally been pried from the landscape; everything is green and new; Robins sing lullabies each evening while Cardinals sing all day long. Butterflies test the water with dainty toes, fluttering about on warm, sunny days. Colorful songbirds begin to appear, vanguards of an approaching migration. And early spring wildflowers begin unfolding their petals.

It is truly a rebirth, and a time for rejoicing. Those of us with a bit of the ol' Pagan spirit might even doff our clothes and have at a seasonal celebration dance.

April and May just might be the best Ohio has to offer, and her were are, my wife and I, driving away.

We are, of course, off to another innkeeping job, this one at a 32-unit motel in West Glacier, MT. We are, again of course, not going right at Montana, but instead heading for Texas, where the Bluebonnets and the Paintbrush are in bloom. And even then, Montana is a week and a half off; there are new wildflowers to see in the desert SW and California and the Columbia River Basin. The potential for new wildflowers and birds is so great, leaving Ohio in mid-April is a lot more bearable.

On the other hand, I envy Ohio nature lovers their spring adventures. The wildflowers are just beginning; by May, when warbler migration is in full swing, woodland floors will be a barroom brawl. Even now, as we pull away, Dutchman's Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), Ground Ivy (Glechoma hederaceae), Cut-leaved Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata), and Harbinger-of-spring (Erigenia bulbosa) are blooming in and around the small wooded area by the parking lot of my mother-in-law's apartment building.

One of the wildflower highlights of this day however, was none of these early bloomers, but several acres of farmland painted pink with weedy little Dead Nettle (Lamium puroureum). It's an annual, and its square stem and opposite leaves are a dead give-away: it's a member of the Mint (Lamiaceae) Family. It generally grows six to twelve inches tall, and has small - up to ¾" long - pink to purple flowers. The flower's corolla is fused, forming a tube with a hooded upper lip and a flared lower lip. It got introduced from Eurasia, and generally isn't welcome in yards, but being an early bloomer, it filled our garden beds with a carpet of pink, like the interstate-side farmland we were seeing an hour into our 16-day trip, and it was lovely.

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