Spring in Virginia

SPRING IN VIRGINIA

Spring in Virginia, my favorite season. Down here, it lasts a long while. First, we have crocuses and daffodils peeking through, sometimes with some snow still on the ground in the shady spots. Then we have to wait for one stretch of about two days of warm weather, like in the mid-fifties or above, then a good dose of rain: and then the world explodes! We’ll have a thunderstorm one afternoon and after it, I’ll hear “peepers” (tiny, baby frogs…don’t remember hearing them in semi-urban New Jersey…maybe on my grandparents’ farm) echoing from the woods and creek behind the house. After that rain-warmth cycle, the first color will be the swelling leaf-buds on the trees – maple, oak, beech, sweet gum, birch, sycamore, linden, pin oak, hickory – to add to the green that hangs around all year in the hemlocks, pines, cedars, and spruces. Then the leaves appear, first light green, then darker; then the first color.

There are these slender trees down here called Eastern redbuds…the flowers hang in grape-like clusters and are really more purple than red; about the time they’re fading, the dogwoods—the state tree--explode into white flowers and grow wild all over the landscape, as do the native redbuds. By the time the dogwoods are fading, all the flowering shrubs – lilacs, azaleas, rhododendrons, camellias—pop open. Then all Toni and I have to do is go to a nursery and come home and plant the annuals: marigolds, zinnias, impatiens—and by that time, it’s time for me to take my turn at tilling the 3,000-square-foot garden and get in my beloved tomatoes, eggplants, peppers—twenty kinds of hot ones-- and the stuff I’ll grow for others: squash (which I’ll grow for everyone else but personally refuse to eat; as Russell Baker once wrote, “squash is the only vegetable that tastes like it sounds”), beets, beans and sugar peas (I’ll eat them), and ten or fifteen different herbs--rosemary and oregano grow all year. Toni and I argue sometimes about who plants what and how much to plant, but it’s a fun kind of arguing; after all, it feeds us, plus friends and neighbors.

What I love most, maybe, are the aromas of spring; sometimes, the air smells scented from all the flora, but often, it just carries a crispness that makes me want to suck in cubic yards of it. And the nights! It gets windy a lot through early May, and the stars, unaffected by the ground lights (there aren’t any) are spectacular, like the night skies I remember as a boy…or on dark, moonless, windy nights in summer and winter in New Jersey, when I was a kid, anyway. Some nights, the Milky Way looks as if God took a finger and smeared cream across the darkness. Before the leaves mature, on a full-moon night, the shadows of the trees stretch out forever, and we can walk our quiet country property and the paths up the mountain as if it were broad daylight…or narrow daylight.

On our upstairs deck out back, we can sit out there at night and listen to the night sounds of owls and whippoorwills off in the trees, and the coons and possums and skunks snuffling around in the leaves. That lasts until summer arrives and the ‘skeeters move in…and we have to move back inside. Even the house smells clean, like laundry dried on the line outside, when we can open the windows and let the world blow through. I guess I come back alive with the spring; I’m so dormant, like the plant world, in the winter. The only exercise I can get is splitting some of the wood that’s still too big and carrying it in…and my one- or two-mile walk every other day when my knees are in the mood. The first semi-warm day will find me outside, doing anything, just to be outdoors.

As I’ve said, Virginia’s a good place to be…all year long, but especially in the spring.

Even on April Fool’s Day.