Almost everyone is bundling up this Easter, and vegetation, crops and small creatures are no exception. An old weather saying is that it won't freeze after the oak leaves are as big as a squirrel's ear. These leaves were much larger than that last Monday, but we are in our 4th night of lows in the 20s, and we are probably in milder air than many who will read this. Some even have snow for Easter.
In the St. Louis area, our flowering trees and almost everything was about three weeks ahead of "normal." Even the Dogwoods were starting to bloom on April 1, instead of their usual third weekend of April peak time. We had lots of our Color Magic tulips and the azalea was blooming too.
Our redbud, given to Lois and Bob before they moved, looked great on Monday. Unfortunately, these blooms and our lilac and many other blooms, as well as the flowers on the shade trees, are history as Easter dawns. We'll have to wait and see if the trees will have to leaf out again.
On Monday while I was on campus I took this picture of a new water feature known as The Lakes, in front of the new Student Center. The fountains, the buds, the frolicking geese and strolling students gave the place the air of a resort, almost. It was the first day back after Spring Break.
One of the signature trees on the campus is this towering bald cypress planted just outside the old Student Union. Seeing it leaf out every spring is like greeting an old friend...something I've been able to do for 25 years now. Even for a retired person, the campus is always a lovely place to walk through in almost any season.To all: have a blessed Easter day, no matter what the weather.
1 comment:
The bald cypress. I didn't know it's name til now. I remember walking onto campus a timid and cowering 18 year old 13 years ago and making my way to JC Penney (a horrible ice-breaker for incoming students; a bad box lunch; a tshirt I may still have somewhere boxed away). I can't say I noticed the tree that very first time. i do remember the smell of JCP though, an institutional cum bookish odor that I associate with learning and the vertiginous edge of possibility -- thrilling success on one side, horrible failure on the other -- upon which I felt I teetered most of my years in college. At some point, though, I know I registered that tree, b/c just before I left STL last year I had to go to TJL for a book and walked the familiar route ... up from the parking lot in the little valley between Woods and JCP, through the JCP lobby and past the tree, which for the first time struck me in that way something familiar re-registers with an intensity that is both new and yet obviously drawing on long reserves of memory in order to make its effect felt. These paths and landmarks become the ties that bind us somehow, ourselves to our pasts, the present person to the future we grow into, which inescapably fulfills what we were and what we still hope to become. I hope. -d
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