The world made new, again

My body seems to know Daylight Savings is coming (like tomorrow! Ugh…). Or perhaps I’ve just never gotten back to CST since my trip to St. Thomas. Whatever the reason, I wake up early, early, early these days, and this morning, I woke up not just early, but full of hopes and expectations. It’s spring here, and we take some extra steps when the weather person says we’ll have a frost, but spring will not be stopped.

I was out planting some Snapdragons, some Salavia and a little Lily of the Valley before 6:30 this morning, stopped long enough to eat the breakfast my spouseman had fixed for us, and then headed back out. The early morning light is so gentle and kind. I stopped and looked out across our front yard and thought I saw something I had been waiting on for three years. Surely, it was, but probably not, I said to myself. I went up close and looked. Yes! In early 2015 Sherod and I went to a plant nursery outside Selma with some dear friends. It was our first spring after 18 years and everything was new again. We ended up buying a cherry tree sapling, a couple of dogwoods and some wild azaleas.

Cherry blossoms

I knew the wild Azaleas had started blooming for the first time ever, about a week ago. A few days ago, I saw the first tiny dogwood flower at the tip of one of the branches, still green and unfurling. Today, it was the cherry blossom that made itself known to me. The azaleas have been quite exuberant, with lots of blossoms; the cherry tree and dogwood will require more patience, unfolding into spring more slowly; carefully, testing this new world they have come to inhabit, though I trust a spring will come when they’ll be bold enough to cover themselves in blooms.

Dogwood

It may be next spring or the one after, when it’s not just one or two flowers at a time; perhaps the wait will be longer. I think that’s as it should be—it seems like it would be too much for the eye and heart to bear, seeing a sapling still so small and frail, loaded down with blossoms. It would be too easy to take them for granted and miss the exquisite beauty of a single, somewhat lonely flower waving gently in the morning breeze. I might miss it all if time hurried too quickly.