Spring in the County is gently and slowly unfolding, as magical as when I was a child, not in the hurried way we usually experience it. Stravinsky in his Rite of Spring expresses this explosion so perfectly. The Russian springtime must have been very similar to ours. How delighted I was when I found the violets.

 

The trees a cloaked in a shimmer of rusty read, accentuated by the green of my beloved white pines and the straggly, unassuming cedars and red pines. Only the sedate willows are embracing ones soul with the tenderests of green. Like the old lovely Crayola green crayon from times past, no longer in the packages. It was always a green that I particularly favoured. It brings me back to little memory treasures that were so very big when I was a child. It was shortly after the war in Germany when kind American people send Care packages to schoolchildren.  I remember Planter’s peanuts in a tin, to be carefully shared between three children. Colouring books and Crayola Crayons. It must have been the small packages with 6 or 12, containing the lovely early spring willow green one. My heart is still brimful with the pleasure of it and the gratitude.

 

The other morning on my walk with my two little four legged friends Mini and Sassy, it must have been a little after six a.m., a woman came walking out of the morning mist towards us. She walked with outstretched arms as if embracing the whole world. “Isn’t this magical, I love early morning fog” she most exuberantly exclaimed. She had a gorgeous mane of unruly read hair, was tucked into a warm jacket and still wore her silk pajama bottoms. I love the unpretentiousness of County people.

 

I sprinkled some birdseed on the balcony off my office and watch a chipmunk inhale it like a little vacuum cleaner. As tiny as they are, they sound like elephants when they romp from my balcony along the ledge that connects to the deck on the other side of the house, just as cats will do when you hear them romp upstairs. They so delight me. What fun it was to watch them in the winter at the back of the house when their little heads popped out of a hole they had made in the snow, carefully checking to see if the coast was clear and then venturing out, leaving little footprints on the snow that looked  like lace.

 

 

I have begun a Stinging Nettle Cleanse and will share it with you at my next posting and the wild greens that fill my lunch and dinner plate.