Appreciating Spring

In southern California, where winter happens somewhere else and flowers bloom year 'round, it might be easy to lose sight of what spring means to folks in Ohio or Indiana or North Carolina, all places where winter has spit me out into the warm motherly embrace of the Vernal Equinox. Perhaps my attitude has grown fat and lazy, but I hope not. Though I have been blessed with a bounty of tolerable weather and winter-long wildflowers this year, I can still feel the wonder and the glee that only spring can polish my silver with.

In Ohio, spring was an annual celebration that lasted for more than two months. April and May were daily trips beneath the Christmas tree where I unwrapped the season's latest offerings; migrating songbirds, emerging butterflies, morel mushrooms, new life in the garden, and wildflowers. Lots and lots of wildflowers.

Frequent forays into the woods along nearby Hogback Rd. were spiritually uplifting. The woods were blanketed with White and Yellow Trout Lilies, Large-flowered, Drooping, and Sessile Trillium, ubiquitous Spring Beauties, close-to-the-ground Rue Anemones and Hepatica, unusual and unmistakable Squirrel's Corn and Dutchman's Breeches, Bellwort, bright yellow Hispid Buttercup and Lesser Celandine and Wood Poppies, Golden Ragwort, outrageously red Firepinks, delicate and gorgeous Wild Columbine, pink Wild Geraniums and purple Wild Blue Phlox, exquisite Blue-eyed Mary, pine cone-like Squawroot, elegant green Jack-in-the-Pulpit...

In northern Indiana, in the woods near a Heron rookery, it was more of the same plus some. Among all of those familiar spring-time treasures I found Miterwort and Prairie Trillium and snow-melting Skunk Cabbage and Bird's-foot Violet and more.

And in North Carolina, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, well, I don't think spring could have been more generous. I walked among Pink and Yellow Lady's-slippers, sweetly-scented Showy Orchis, Yellow and Painted Trillium and Wake Robin, Carolina Spring Beauties... It was a king's ransom in botanical booty, and all of it, in North Carolina, Indiana and Ohio, came at the end of a long hard trek through winter. Of course a stick and some bellybutton lint would seem like treasure at the end of winter, but that in no way diminishes those many joyous wildflowers.

And now, at the end of, uh, a protracted autumn, I find myself again reveling in spring wildflowers, even if they have come during the winter months with the nearest snow miles and miles away and a few thousand feet higher up. I am gleeful in my discovery of each and every new blossom; it doesn't matter that my winter was not cold and snowy but merely strangely indifferent. Spring, with all its wildflowers, is still a celebration, and there's nothing else like it.

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