Bienvenue au printemps

[In which she attempts anything but the war.]

Snow on the mountain--water in
the valley; you beat a mule and
it works hard, Honey.

-William Stafford, from "A Song in the Manner of Flannery O'Connor"

It's no secret that I am always in love with flowers. But I have a special kind of love for the flowering trees that appear, kind of cat-like, when I least expect them. I swear the blooming of this year is the only thing keeping my head from exploding.

So I love to see the flowering pear, with its rotund body coming to a graceful point. It's surely the boldest of the flowerers, coming out with its little puffs of white accompanied by just a smattering of green, smelling to high heaven at first like spring and then vaguely like rotting compost. You want to love it the best, but the green creeps in too quickly, and looks mottled partway through its vanity.

It signals in the forsythia, the most perfect of the ugly bushes: brown unruly sticks for most of the year, boring and oddly-shaped with foliage the rest. But for a lovely few weeks in March, it is covered with bright yellow bursts of seduction, no leaves in sight, screaming to be the loudest of the first bloomers. It sings to me like a siren; I am always lulled into post-winter happiness.

But I love no one so much as the redbud, a tree whose acquaintance I did not have the pleasure of making until my fortuitous move to Chapel Hill, whose planners lined the main of only two roads that connect anything to anything with them. Each day they woo me with their emerging flowers, not red at all, but a rich and understated shade of purple. Their branches aren't pudgy, like the pear's, but long and pointy like a supermodel's fingers holding a delicate glass of crystal; they just barely touch the air. They're marvelous.

Happily, when the redbud starts to wane, out creeps the dogwood, a tree belonging to the South, and aptly so. Its white, perfectly 4-pointed flowers are tricky, appearing first as greenish buds the color of cooked brussels sprouts, giving no indication of the love to come. The branches are nature's ballerina, arms held as if suspended by gossamer strings. Scattered among the deciduous trees just squeezing out their first green buds, the dogwood performs Swan Lake on the decaying underbrush.

I have a love affair with the aesthetics of Spring; the extra minutes of sunshine and sudden green are lovely like my other secret pleasures: Nina Totenburg's fluid voice, the chunky paint on a Van Gogh, the shuffly background noise on public radio's airwaves, the first sip of Diet Coke from a sweaty cold can, the watermelon smell of freshly-cut grass, the abrupt halt of a tuning orchestra when the conductor arrives. Thank heaven above for senses -- they may be the things that keep us sane.