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PatchWork by Joyce Whitis |
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PatchWork by Joyce Whitis |
Deja Vu
Springtime! Gotta love it! It gets me right here....every time! The weather gets really warm, well, actually hot and the weather man stands up before his little map of the whole United States and says, "It's unseasonably warm across the Southern part of the country. Look out for thundershowers this afternoon with continued record breaking temperatures throughout the rest of the week."
Don't you simply love folks who tell you things that you already know? Of course it doesn't take a Bill Gates mentality to figure out that there will most likely be rain from all those clouds up there and no sun plus we have already set the air conditioning to cool the place down. Gee!
Besides the fact that suddenly it's time to drag out the shorts and flip-flops, springtime, with a promise of an absolutely fantastic summer dead ahead, gets me going every time. For most of my adult life, the season has sort of gone like this:
I'll be driving down the half mile of gravel road to our house and "WOW", I say right out loud. "Just look at THAT!" Everything on both sides of that road has turned green, just while I was in town for a couple of hours. Grass that was brown just a little while ago is glistening with new growth and spills out of the fields, through the wire fence and into the ditches. Giant bois 'd arc trees, the ground beneath them scattered with last year's knobby apple crop, are touched with the palest green, their brown limbs necked down close to the trunk.
Willows, ancient post oak, and chinaberry trees all sprout fledgling green leaves and even the big live oaks are boasting a new shade of green. Scattered at random are white and purple flowers, small and delicate, fresh and new since yesterday. Mesquites still look bare but a close look reveals that winter is truly over for these hearty little desert trees are about to burst into their first lacy glory of spring.
By the time I drive up to the house, I'm ready to high five every creature I see, including that loud-mouthed Grackle perched in the top of a swaying mimosa.
Who can be unhappy on such a glorious spring day? There's a hummingbird feasting on the sugar water I put out on March 21. The little birds always arrive at our house on March 24th but I don't want an advance hummer to get here with nothing to drink so I fill the feeder a few days in advance each year.
We always entertain hundreds of birds in the spring and summer but one spring I saw a lone hummingbird circling the spot where we have been hanging a feeder for several years. He must have been here before, I thought and ran to the kitchen to get his dinner ready. Since that day, I've always had the table set when the first bird arrived from his winter in Mexico.
There's one other thing left to put me deep in the spell of spring that warm weather, fair skies, green meadows, and pretty flowers casts. That thing is the opening season of baseball and this past week, we got it. As sure as the grass turns green and trees sprout new leaves, somebody throws a ball and somebody else attempts to hit it. Somebody runs around the bases and somebody touches him with the batted ball. Somebody waves his arms and screams, "You're out!" and somebody gets red in the face and shouts, "You're blind!"
Every spring begins the same and there is great comfort in that. I like knowing that suddenly everything will turn green in my world, that the birds will come back again and that America's national pastime endures. Somehow the three are inseparable for me and bring untold joy with the promise of sunny days ahead. In fact to quote a one time catcher for the Yankees, hall of famer, Yogi Berra, "It's deja vu all over again!"