April Showers and May Flowers

You can learn a lot from adages and idioms. In many ways they are a snapshot of a language and a culture at some indefinate point in the past, and hold a memory of something nearly forgotten. Take "April Showers bring May Flowers". Fascinating. So the rains come in April, and we don't have flowers until May? This saying has obviously tenaciously perservered in the English language since the last ice age.

A Saint Louis Spring, understand, does not have the luxury of spacing out it's bloom into neat little rhymes. The Winter fades away by March, throwing a strange snowfall now and then (last Saturday, for example). One would assume this would lead to an earlier Spring, and indeed it does. The last snows fall on blooming Magnolia trees and little red leaf buds swelling slowly.

Then the Equinox hits, and overnight it begins to rain. Constantly. The sky is always cloudy and the air is wonderful. 60 degrees, high humidity. It doesn't get any more beautiful than that. The whole earth smells clean and ready. Couldn't it stay like that for a while?

March 22nd. Spring is well underway. The Magnolias and little Red Leaflets are ancient history. The new colour is Yellow, springing out where there was nothing but dead wood the day before. The grass is already much greener, and soon...

March 23rd. New colours emerge every night. Today there are those beautiful, delicate white petals on all the bradford pears and on those thin, foreign looking trees. There seems to be a pink variety as well, as they look similar and always bloom together, but I'll never know if it's simply a deviation or a different species entirely.

March 24th. Purple and a slight hint of green on the underbrush emerge to join the quickly expanding palette. I catch sight of the first Daffodil, a bloom in my neighbors yard completely unfolded. The cool air is gone, save in early morning, where it takes it's refuge even in the hottest summer months, if you awake with the sun. No, it is lovely when I drive to work, and a calm seventy degrees throughout the day, but by the time I drive home my car reads 85 degrees, and even sitting in the sun, it's too early for that...

Still, I roll down the windows and the air feels so soft... Spring has come too early and for it's impatience must leave too early, but I must forgive it. I must... :)