Now is the time of the flowering trees. It's a great time to drive in countryside and see what is flowering. I have seen flowering in the Magnolia and the crab apple, but not in the cherry or the blueberry. I have seen a yard of several thousand bee boxes, none of them deployed to orchards or blueberry fields. It's a little past bud break in the woods, so it's pleasant to see the trees in green, yellow and red, but not fully in leaf yet. Soon the tree will assume its seasonal rainment. The river's tent will be completed in green canvas. The oaks are still pushing out buds; they are the last to burst into oakleaf.
So many signs of the season are past. The maples throw those red buds that look a little bit like cloves and a little bit like a breakfast cereal. Once the leaves appear, the sap grows bitter, so maple sugaring is over. Once the temperature stays above freezing at night, the ice coatings of the lighthouses can fully melt away. We might find snow deep in the woods, but I would be very surprised. Out at Pere Marquette Beach, a long pipeline is running across the strand by the waterworks, and the spout is flowing with sandy water. It looks as if they are trying to build more beach, extending it out into the lake. Bulldozers are busy moving around the sand once the snow fence is pulled out of the sand drifts. I once saw a line of loaves of sand, sculpted by a steamshovel, awaiting transportation by Captain Jacks.
This is the first year I've seen heavy equipment cleaning yards of cottages in the first row facing the lake. Usually signs of free sand or freer sand or really, really free sand convince people to take it out with pails and truckloads. The sand dredges are busy at the mouth of the Muskegon Harbor of Refuge and all over the marinas. People who forage are visiting the woods for the tender early shoots. I was pointing out skunk cabbage and cowslip in the swamp to two young teenagers. One boy is quite right. The skunk cabbage does look a lot like rhubarb, which also is showing up on plates as pie, something for Garrison Keillor to sing about and advertise. A friend of mine understands where to look for morels and she has a private spot she visits near a bayou in Spring Lake, Michigan. The morels can come up under the pines now because rain and warmth promotes their growth. I'm not so sure I want to slay a wild pig, but I know I want to find some morels this season. She's had to assert gathering rights to the pine needles under her conifers in her front yard more than once.
I like May because May is still innocent of summer heat. In May, we are still discovering our summer way without the hundred days of summer elapsing. I am thinking of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 104, a line that says it well: Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd.
I wonder why my mother's lilacs hadn't blossomed into full clusters by Mother's Day. Usually, the clusters are fully purple and fragrant. Huh, Mackinaw Island doesn't celebrate its lilac festival until June the 10th: http://www.mackinacislandlilacfestival.org/
Sonnet 104 burns the perfume of April in the heat of June.
2 comments:
We always look forward to the lilacs blooming in Lighthouse Park down by the Muskegon Channel. It is fragrant for weeks!
-Hugh
Thanks Hugh! I'll pay some attention to them.
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