Michele Womble: Blog

The last week has been really nice.  As the kids put it, it feels so good not to have to wear a hat.  Although a few are still wearing hats of some sort, we have abandoned ours.  For now, hatless does feel rather free.  It also feels really free to be able to throw on your jacket and shoes and run out the door.  It no longer takes ten minutes or so to get dressed to go out.  I can't say it's been warm, exactly (we're still in light jackets), but then warm can be a somewhat relative term, and it certainly has been a lot warmer this week than it's been in a long time.

The Box Elders (or "Ash-leaf maples") have all flowered - they look like they are covered all over with light green lace.  They will leaf later - but if you don't look closely it LOOKS like they have small pale leaves.  I've never considered them to be very pretty trees (especially compared to other maples), but that may not be fair to them, it could be that city life just doesn't agree with them.  Here in the city, at least, they are rather bent and straggly.  But I'm still very thankful to have one outside my bedroom window.  (I used to have one outside my kitchen window, too, but "they" cut it down.)  And despite the usual awkwardness (in this city, at least) of the Box Elder, in the early spring it is among the first to flower and bring color to all the grayness, the first to dress itself for spring.  In the early spring, the Box Elder is a beautiful tree.  Even when it is bent and straggly.

The Cottonwood is also flowering, and around the corner along the road the Mountain Ash (Rowan) is proudly displaying tiny leaves.  These leaves are covering the brown shriveled up berries that are so ugly now, but were so beautiful and red in the winter.  (Usually cedar waxwings fly in and eat the berries during the winter, but this year they did not.  Maybe they didn't like the weather, either?)

Funny, how we dress for the cold of the winter while the trees undress for it, and we rid ourselves of our warm winter clothes just when the trees begin to adorn themselves for spring....

The Box Elder outside my window.

Flowering Cottonwood in the midst of white birch.

Cottonwood old leaves and new green.

Young Rowan leaves.