A beautiful Spring day, with a high of 75 degrees--sunny, windy, a few clouds, and the first blooms on our daffodils. The official first day of Spring is 3 weeks away, so today was just a practice run. Later in the week it'll be cold again. Then warm. Then cold. It'll go on like this for weeks. We'll give the cold spells names like Redbud Winter or Dogwood Winter because the temperature always seems to drop around the time the Redbuds, then the Dogwoods, are blooming. One year this happened so often, we ran out of names. We had used Forsythia Winter, Crab Apple Winter, Autumn Olive Winter, Blackberry Winter, and I don't remember what else, and finally just gave up. Not long after that, the weather stayed normal.
Last year, we had a long spell of unseasonably warm days in February, followed by a deep freeze. All the new leaves on the trees froze and dropped to the ground. It looked like November. We lost two trees. Most trees re-leafed and made it through the Spring, but then we had an unusually hot and dry summer. Days and days of intense heat and no rain. So now we wait and hold our breath, wondering which trees are still alive, and pray that we won't have a repeat of last Spring's late freeze. In the meantime, we enjoy the early blooms of the daffodils and are grateful for their hardiness.
First bloom, first sign of
change from Winter's gray, cold days--
is it really Spring?
