Purple haze

I'm back on the work schedule and I'm brain dead. I got five hours of sleep last night because I got in that weird sleep pattern. Blogger has been testy all day. I couldn't even get into it for most of the morning and pictures won't post. It was a nice day though.

After two days of dreary chilling rain, the sun finally broke through and it turned out to be a pleasant afternoon. I went for a walk to enjoy the sun and the towering, glowering clouds on the horizon. The wisteria and the early bloomers are long gone. Today I saw lilies and azaleas in a multitude of colors. The annuals are asserting themselves in the flower beds. Relentlessly cheerful pansies are spreading now in wide swaths of purple and yellow with the occasional patch of white struggling for attention.

And there are roses. The wild brambly ones with tiny blossoms claiming their corner of long forgotten farms on the edges of the developments and along the roadsides, while in the tidy yards a dozen different varities of prim cultivars pimp their multicolored finery. I passed a grape arbor where vines rising from a gnarled base thick as a hundred year old tree already threaten to take over the trellis and white clematis curled in the corners preparing for a counterattack.

It feels odd to turn a corner and run into a peony at this time of year. This accerlated cycle leaves me with a vague sense of urgency, like the summer is already passing and I'm missing it. After all those years in New England, the ingrained subconscious cues that connected me to the seasons are being challenged. I hear the daffodils are just coming out in Northampton. Somehow that sounds more real and right to me, than what I see before my eyes.

I wish I could take two weeks off and be in New England for daffodil season. It's the best time year there, when the earth bursts forth like a time lapse photo. It's like living inside a miracle.