Springing at Three Venues

I
Lake Cheston

blue sky, budded trees, warm temperature, toad strings waving the water, Oscar swimming, and one Fragile Forktail sunning

II
J's Garden

twin-leaf, bloodroot, grape hyacinth, daffodils, vinca, celadine poppy, budded trillium

III
Abbo's Alley

Virginia spring-beauty, vinca, daffodils, Japanese magnolia, bluebells

It's been a long wait.

That Spot of Red

in the water bead: me.
Selfie with bluebell,
both of us
holding the cold.

Chasing Winter Away

I. 
At Lake Cheston, I stretched my legs, listened to American toads sing, watched a large snapping turtle settle himself atop a lily vine, looked up at maple flowers bursting everywhere, reddening tree limbs with little bows of life. I came to the beach, and there it was: the first dragonfly of the season -- a Common Green Darner, weaving in and out of the plants and last year's cattails, zooming up and back down with the energy of the season, the turquoise flash of its abdomen like neon in sunlight.

II.
A single spot of blue in Abbo's Alley, so blue, so deep and varied and startlingly rich that even at that moment, with clouds rolling in again, the sky still seemed blue itself in reflection. Trink's cow statue and I both know: this is a sacred season.

III.

I'm singing spring's blues!

J's garden gives me

as much pleasure as little Ebee takes from a walk around the lake.

Bluebells

In her wonderful book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay includes this passage in her chapter titled "Blue":"It is curious that in England the word 'blue' should represent depressing as well as transcendent things; that it should be the most holy hue and the color of pornography. Perhaps this is because blue recedes into the distance -- artists use it to create space in their paintings; TV stations use it as a background on which they can superimpose other footage -- so it represents a place that is outside normal life, beyond not only the seas but the horizon itself. Fantasy, depression and God are all, like blue, in the more mysterious reaches of our consciousness."

How do I describe the blue of the bluebell? Ultramarine? Azure? Cerulean? Indigo? Sapphire? Royal? Persian? Cobalt? Prussian?

Like God, like depression, like fantasy, it is all these and more.Celebrate blue and the bluebell.