Sunday, April 13, 2008

Gratitude that Spring Has Kind of Sprung

As we come out of winter each year, spring is always so welcome. This year spring has had a really hard time getting started. We had a few warm days in February and that signaled to the tulip and daffodil bulbs to come on up. Then we had a lot of cold weather for a long time--until about two days ago--and so the various frosts wiped out literally half of all our tulips. Yesterday (Saturday, April 12) our first tulip actually opened. It was fun to talk to Rachel for a minute on the phone and she said their first tulips opened the exact same day! I imagine today many more of them will open. We actually had spotty sunshine yesterday and we have spotty sunshine today. I counted 100 tulips in one section in the front that are ready to burst. The daffodils have been pretty sparse this round. Again, I think the frost really affected them. I need to talk to Lucas about when we can plant some more bulbs, I think I would like to put in another 500.

The cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin this year were spectacular. For the ten or twelve days they last there were literally only a few hours of sunshine--and we actually drove by one day when the sun was shining on them! That is one of the most beautiful sites in our nation. I love that amazing place. Remember when we first came to look around Washington as a family and we heard on the news that a beaver had chewed and felled one of the nation's cherry trees there and dumped it in the Tidal Basin? That was quite a beaver. The magnolias have started to come out (they are actually more spectacular than the cherry blossoms). I wish we had more of them around. The dogwood should be soon to follow. I think I like the delicate beauty of the dogwood most of all.

My delightful Mother gave me a sense of delight for the spring each year. As we would gaze out across our two-hundred-acre wood (just twice as big as Christopher Robin's) she would first see the red-bud trees (an actual tree). She would be so excited about them and exclaim each morning with joy and rejoicing that the red buds were returning. Then would come the dogwood (Mom's favorite) and they would be like little explosions of white all through the dreary forest. We could see every one of them from the house because no other leafs would be on the trees. Mom swooned over the dogwoods and could not drive but a few feet without exclaiming with gratitude her joy over the arrival of the dogwood. She would always connect her joy and happiness about nature with her love for the Creator and her absolute faith in Him. Her exclamations of delight, gratitude and joy would not cease in summer--the focus would be on the myriad of wild flowers on the farm and the arrival of the blackberries. She would not wane in the fall as she loved the changing of the colors and the increased movement of all the wildlife on the farm. And there was not a complaint to be heard through the bleak Missouri winters, only delight in the beauty of the light as it shone upon our crystal forests covered with ice. I heard these exclamations for the forty-eight seasons (less eight) that I lived on the farm. With such a Mother as I have, how can I not be grateful for the arrival of any season, come what may?

4 comments:

time-for-a-paws said...

It makes me so excited to see these flowers grow!

GustoBones said...

I love Spring too. Such a time of hope and rebirth

Mariah "Sniggs" said...

Even though I got to hear you talk about the joy of spring 3 or 4 times in the past two days....I love it too---and heck, Moroni visited Joseph about that many times with the same message in one night. Way to pick a good example to follow!

Beanie said...

This is a rich entry which takes me mentally to all the places you describe and makes me rejoice in your mother who taught you to see such beauty everywhere. That is my memory of my mother, too, as I mentioned this week in Family Home Evening. She was always exclaiming with glee about every beautiful thing. She said that her gift in life was an appreciative heart.