Plum Time
The plums are flowering, their tentative little puffs of colour heralding spring. This old one in the photo above has heralded a lot of springs and looks to be getting a bit tired of it, like it would rather just skip spring and wake up in late April or May fully clothed.
But there’s a winter to be banished so they get up and push those flowers out and be the first to give everyone some relief from the austerity of naked branches against the sky which in November or December seemed so right, the stripping away of the year, the hunkering down, the closure, but which in the middle of February everybody’s about had enough of. It’s the plums that let you know you’ve made it through another winter and that if you can just hold on a little bit longer everything’s going to be alright.
It wasn’t much of a winter here, though, so I get the feeling that we didn’t really hold up our end of the bargain. It didn’t get terribly cold at all, there was no snow and not much rain. Just an unusually generous amount of bright clear days where the sun made you feel pleasantly reptilian; you headed for the nearest park bench and just basked for a while pretending you were no longer human.
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Posted to The Good • 2002.02.09 (Sat) • 16:13
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