Sprouts & Flowers

It's been just warm enough and just rainy enough that things are happening.  I don't remember planting what look like mini-hyacinths but there they were when I was out picking up windblown trash yesterday.  Maybe they're just stunted but I think they look cute.


We have a dandelion.  Durwood's less than thrilled but I recently read that dandelions are the first nectar producing flowers that bloom so the bees can get busy and bees are in trouble from all the pesticides and insecticides people spray around.  I've always liked dandelions--their cheerful bright color, their puffy white seed heads that make flurries of what look like fairies when the wind blows.  He thinks they're weeds.  Tsk.


The forsythia has a lot of buds and a few are open.  More, many more, to come.  The forsythia is a flowering shrub that I remember from when I was a little little girl in Evansville, Indiana.  I don't know why it's stuck so firmly in my mind but I always think of Mom asking, "For who?" when we saw one and I'd say, "Forsythia."  Shows how long something you say to a child can stick with them.  So watch your mouth.




In the flower bed behind the kitchen one of the ferns is just beginning to show a little green.  See the little fists of fronds just barely visible?  And those pink sprouts are the peonies (from my grandma's farm in Evansville) just poking out.











Today is one of the rainy days.  I woke up to thunder rumbling in the distance and there have been off and on showers all morning.  I think it's supposed to really warm up today and then be nice for Easter tomorrow.  I hope so, so there can be outdoor Easter egg hunts instead of the indoor ones we used to have when we moved up here and there was still snow all over come Easter.  My farm grandma used to hide her Easter eggs in the rows of daffodils she had planted down by the driveway.  I remember my cousins, brothers, and me all decked out in our Easter finery hunting eggs in the yellow flowers.  (good lord, I'm nostalgic today)


I kind of got carried away knitting on the leg of the Helical Sock Sock yesterday and got a good inch beyond where I'd intended to start the heel but this is pretty much a made-up sock so no worries.  I added a short-row heel in yarn #2 at Friday Night Knitting, well, I was one row from nibbling back the held stitches for the heel when it was time to leave so I sat right down when I got home, finished it, and then got all three yarns back into action for the drive down the foot.

April 15--Illuminated manuscript, Ascension of Christ.

Waving angels stand
on a pyramid
of bubbles.
People holding books
cluster
at their feet.
Jesus squirts
through a hole
in the ceiling 
to play with cherubs.

Um, I suspect my interpretation is
off.
~~~~~

Tax day today but because it's Saturday the slackers have until Monday to get their returns filed.  We got ours done last month and already have the refund in the bank--and have spent a chunk of it fixing my struts.  Hey, it's starting to look a bit brighter outside.  Maybe I'll get dressed and run my errands while it looks halfway nice.  Happy almost-Easter.
--Barbara