Yes, spring is still my favorite season of the year, hands down.
I've been trying to rework some things in my life so as to be less busy, and while I can tell that I definitely am making gradual progress, this spring the combination of a fairly full schedule and some physical discomforts has limited my ability to enjoy being outside as much as I'd like. That said, spring has still sprung, and here are some events that I'm still excited about.
Some six or eight weeks ago, I began hearing a reprise of the wonderfully melodic bird songs we've heard during the past two springs, the source of which I have identified as purple finches. I truly LOVE to hear these guys sing! Well, they've been singing away several times a day for weeks now, and I'm pretty sure they and their relatives have built two nests, one above the back office window (which Mr. SS examined and found wanting) and one on top of the left stone porch post.
Meanwhile, for about the same stretch of time, a barred owl has been regularly reminding me that I'm on my own as far as meal prep is concerned. I've never been able to see him, but I always smile when I hear him as he asks his "Who cooks for YOU? Who cooks for you all?" questions. I think he hangs out in the trees by the ditch, and for a couple weeks he called pretty consistently around 7:15 PM. Then he expanded to also calling off and on in the morning and afternoon. = ) It's just such a cheerful sound!
In visual news, on the morning of May 1, the Missouri primroses up at the 65/160 interchange suddenly burst into bloom in all their brilliant yellow glory, and now, three weeks later, they're still hard at it every morning. I get to experience their striking beauty on my way to and from the gym every morning, and they make me very happy.
The very next morning, one of our white - actually very, very pale pink - peonies opened. It was the one on the right end, closest to the smokehouse. I am a big fan of Lazy Genius Principle #1, "Decide once." It means figuring out the best way to do a repetitive task and then always doing the thing that way... until it doesn't work. Deciding once eliminates all the unnecessary brain cycles some of us go through each time we do certain things.
I think God was in a decide once frame of mind when he created perennials. Without any deep analysis or specific effort on their part, perennial flowers simply do the same thing (BLOOM!) over and over and over, year after year after year. When we bought our house nearly 28 years ago, there was a long flower bed of peonies by a little stone wall in what we call the near back (yard). We have never watered or weeded or fertilized or trimmed or in any way tended those peonies, and although the bed is now quite overgrown and even has a couple of young trees sprouted in it, and although a number of the original probably eight bushes have died, the four or so remaining peonies still erupt from the ground every spring as purple sprouts and proceed to crank out huge blossoms for a couple weeks.
Each year I think, "I really should get out there and clean up that bed and maybe even plant a few more peonies in those empty spaces," but every year I am too (fill in the blank: tired, busy, sore, pre-occupied, LAZY?!?) to go out there and do the work. But even in spite of my complete lack of involvement, those peony blossoms still pop out to please me.
Then there's April 25th, which also comes around every year. As evidenced above, I do like birds, both seeing them and hearing them. Here in southwest Missouri, the proper time to set out hummingbird feeders is April 25th, and I am very consistent in doing so, given a day one way or the other. This year, I found myself dealing with a number of other issues in life, and while doing some stuff in the playroom on May 6th, I realized I had missed my self-imposed hang-the-hummingbird-feeders deadline. Horrors! And I may have really messed up this time, because it always takes the hummers a few days to find the feeders. If they had already come looking in the past week or so and found nothing, they may have given up on our porch for the rest of this season. Sigh. But I dutifully prepared the nectar, filled the feeders, and hung them up, hoping against hope.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, I walked past the front door and something out on the porch caught my eye. There was a hummer at the front feeder(!!!), and a second one was slurping from the side feeder.
My natural resources joy was complete!
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