Thursday, March 3, 2011

Winter Fades to Spring







Out here in Westfield, March is a seriously mixed bag: as the snow and ice recede, the bulbs reveal themselves. Clearly, some of the daffodils were too eager, and their shoots show sickly yellow from their sunless days under the snow.

But snow cover is a great thing this time of year – it acts as an insulator, keeping the perennials from being popped out of the ground during the freeze-and-thaw seesaw of late winter.

Our trees are a ragtag bunch, with many branches splintered from the ice and wind. Shrubs are just plain battered, and it's too soon to tell if the boxwood will ever come back to their former globular perfection. But the blossoms on the Chinese witch hazel want to open, so all is not lost.

The days are longer, and the scent of flowers must have wafted down from last weekend's Hartford Flower Show. Pulses quicken a bit, and experience reminds us the roads will shed their soiled ice mounds -- will evening strolls around the neighborhood soon beckon?

Three weeks till the vernal equinox, and only a few days till Daylight Savings Time! Like the lonely snowdrop in the leaf mulch, we persist in our hopefulness – the unruly March wind bursts with the word: Spring!

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