spring is for the birds. and the blossoms
May. 11th, 2019 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliA mourning dove sits on the pavement. It is so gray and brown and palely pink -- ashes of roses, not full rose -- that it looks like a stone in its stillness.
It rains, and all at once all the lawns are lush and green and growing. (Well, yeah, patches where it really was dead. But not much where I have seen.)
A bird soars. Its feathers spread out so widely that they look like fingers, and I wonder whether the ragged flight is the very gusty wind, or missing feathers (though the two wings do match).
It had rained. Enormous thunderheads still loomed, charcoal gray, despite the sun above them, and the lighting fell very strangely, shining through the buds of red and green and yellow like a halo about each trees and making the very colors seem alien.
Two little doves sit on the gravel. More little than the mourning dove I have seen sitting about, and with their feathers still mottled, the adult coloring only starting to show -- the first fledglings of spring.
The apple trees are putting out their buds, tiny and fiercely pink, like jewels, and their leaves as well, so that it is brightly both deep pink and green. The cherries are so thick with flowers you can see nothing but pink, except where rain bears them down or petals have fallen, where the leaves show above, looking orange as the green advances among the reddish tinge.
Some people hold that no flowers clash. They have not seen certain dogwoods, pink with just the tinge of orange, growing by certain cherries, pink with just the tinge of bluish.
A cardinal, bright red, perches hidden within the mass of vividly pink cherry blossom.
Twice I see turtles sunning themselves, on rocks in ponds, on this gray day, once when the rain is faintly sifting down.
I drive by a farm where the cows are out in a pen -- and I realize that in a smaller pen by them, there are pigs. Hard to see, not because they are small, being great thundering beast, but because they are brown and hard to tell from the muddy earth. I wonder if I have missed them before.
The dam of the reservoir has, for once, water sheeting over the top. And for the first time, I see how rock, higher up on one side, makes waterfalls all white as the water flows from left to right. The woods about have green floors where the spring plants run wild, and here and there the hawthorne blossoms whitely below the still barely leaving canopy.
A bird flitting about the tree outside the window -- hard to see -- I diagnose as a Baltimore oriole, and then see its solid dark head -- it looks very like a robin with an uncommonly orange shade of tummy, but it has a stripe of orange running down two-thirds of its back, to its tail -- and it is, indeed, an oriole, only in an arrangement I have never seen before.
A goldfinch flits by, yellow and black and distinctly smaller. And another, and another -- they fly in bobbing arcs, gliding down and then swooping up again.
All along the trunk of a crabapple, it's trying to put out new branches. Below the deep, intense pink flowers, the trunk is shaggy with new leaves.
Dawn light gleams over the hillsides. The trees glow from within, their leaves still light enough that light shines through to be yellow, green, red.
Two mourning doves going peck, peck, peck on the welcome mat.
How subtly the pink dogwoods vary. All the same pink, but some darker, some lighter, some more pure, some more orange, a few more toward purple.
Clouds spread across the sky in two groups. Both are rather flat, with waves of rises and hollows, and the lumpiness like scales, but there is a sharp line across them: one side pale, the other dark gray.
The apple tree blooms pale pink among the green, the contrast making it less of a view from a distance -- unlike the crabapple, where the intense, dark park and the intense dark green combine their darkness to make it like a jewel.
It rains, and all at once all the lawns are lush and green and growing. (Well, yeah, patches where it really was dead. But not much where I have seen.)
A bird soars. Its feathers spread out so widely that they look like fingers, and I wonder whether the ragged flight is the very gusty wind, or missing feathers (though the two wings do match).
It had rained. Enormous thunderheads still loomed, charcoal gray, despite the sun above them, and the lighting fell very strangely, shining through the buds of red and green and yellow like a halo about each trees and making the very colors seem alien.
Two little doves sit on the gravel. More little than the mourning dove I have seen sitting about, and with their feathers still mottled, the adult coloring only starting to show -- the first fledglings of spring.
The apple trees are putting out their buds, tiny and fiercely pink, like jewels, and their leaves as well, so that it is brightly both deep pink and green. The cherries are so thick with flowers you can see nothing but pink, except where rain bears them down or petals have fallen, where the leaves show above, looking orange as the green advances among the reddish tinge.
Some people hold that no flowers clash. They have not seen certain dogwoods, pink with just the tinge of orange, growing by certain cherries, pink with just the tinge of bluish.
A cardinal, bright red, perches hidden within the mass of vividly pink cherry blossom.
Twice I see turtles sunning themselves, on rocks in ponds, on this gray day, once when the rain is faintly sifting down.
I drive by a farm where the cows are out in a pen -- and I realize that in a smaller pen by them, there are pigs. Hard to see, not because they are small, being great thundering beast, but because they are brown and hard to tell from the muddy earth. I wonder if I have missed them before.
The dam of the reservoir has, for once, water sheeting over the top. And for the first time, I see how rock, higher up on one side, makes waterfalls all white as the water flows from left to right. The woods about have green floors where the spring plants run wild, and here and there the hawthorne blossoms whitely below the still barely leaving canopy.
A bird flitting about the tree outside the window -- hard to see -- I diagnose as a Baltimore oriole, and then see its solid dark head -- it looks very like a robin with an uncommonly orange shade of tummy, but it has a stripe of orange running down two-thirds of its back, to its tail -- and it is, indeed, an oriole, only in an arrangement I have never seen before.
A goldfinch flits by, yellow and black and distinctly smaller. And another, and another -- they fly in bobbing arcs, gliding down and then swooping up again.
All along the trunk of a crabapple, it's trying to put out new branches. Below the deep, intense pink flowers, the trunk is shaggy with new leaves.
Dawn light gleams over the hillsides. The trees glow from within, their leaves still light enough that light shines through to be yellow, green, red.
Two mourning doves going peck, peck, peck on the welcome mat.
How subtly the pink dogwoods vary. All the same pink, but some darker, some lighter, some more pure, some more orange, a few more toward purple.
Clouds spread across the sky in two groups. Both are rather flat, with waves of rises and hollows, and the lumpiness like scales, but there is a sharp line across them: one side pale, the other dark gray.
The apple tree blooms pale pink among the green, the contrast making it less of a view from a distance -- unlike the crabapple, where the intense, dark park and the intense dark green combine their darkness to make it like a jewel.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-11 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-11 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-13 04:38 am (UTC)And the feathers spread out like fingers--loved that.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-14 12:54 am (UTC)The lyric muse is to run wild when I write them.