Seasonal musings

Every year about this time, or rather in March since I live in the South, I find myself quoting Wordsworth. I'm not a huge fan of the man, nor of Romantics in general (though I always thought I would be until I took an excruciatingly dull college class), but I do love just two lines from "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud:" "and then my heart with pleasure fills / and dances with the daffodils"

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Originally uploaded by HFBW.

Daffodils wear jackets of snow on the side of the road in Antrim County near Torch Lake, Mich., Saturday, April 23, 2005. (AP Photo/Traverse City Record-Eagle, Lara Neel)


Of course, I've been largely unaware of spring's arrival this year. The ever-present layer of pollen is unavoidable (very disturbing when your dust rag turns yellow), and we did have a few daffodils in our tiny garden, but when you live facing a seven-lane highway, you don't experience the aromas. I do get out about once a week to Cherry Park, which is a lovely wooded oasis, but other than some flowering trees and daffodils, not extremely full of blooms. Plus I spend most of the time in the playground with Abigail. The other day, as I drove Abbey to parents' morning out with the windows down through one of the nicer residential neighborhoods in town, I was caught off guard by the delicious blend of scents in the air: azaleas, cherry trees, wisteria. It was so refreshing -- and until then I hadn't realized I had missed it so far this year. The yards were layered in pink and white dogwoods and azaleas, and that bright, fresh green was in all the trees.

After I dropped Abbey off, I headed over to Winthrop Lake for a walk. Perhaps I'm just unused to being outside at 9 a.m., but I was amazed at the cacaphony of birds! They were absoluty rejoicing to be alive. On either side of the road, in every tree, birds were chirping and trilling their little hearts out. It raised my mood exponentially.

Toward the end of my walk, I passed a section of trees dripping with wisteria, and the perfume was heady. I immediately was taken back to my 2000 trip to Rome and the Forum, where the purple flowers dripped from a tree in front of Tito's Arch. A college friend of mine said she always associated wisteria with Faulkner, but I will always think of Italy. That scent as it drifted through the debris of ancient grandeur, over the heads of the throngs of tourists. That splash of color as is lazed down the side of a stuccoed home in Verona.