Friday Ramble - Spring Flowers and Village Musics

Around the corner, three sparrows are trilling their hearts out from a rooftop. A few doors away, a construction worker is belting out Doug Seeger's “Going Down to the River” as he installs drywall in the old Victorian house on the corner. The door of the place is wide open, and his rendering of the gospel classic is anything but tuneful, but it's a soulful crafting and fine stuff indeed.

There are tulips everywhere and in every shade of the rainbow, but on our rambles, it is the reds that grab our attention every time. The blooms are so bright they dazzle the eyes,  almost incandescent. I often think some of the most beautiful words in the English language are synonyms for the color red: cardinal, carmine, cerise, claret, crimson, flame, garnet, geranium, incarnidine, ruby, scarlet, vermilion, to name just a few.

Frilly golden daffodils and scarlet fringed poet's narcissus nod here and there, and violets sprinkle the garden in deep purple and creamy white. A neighbor's bleeding heart bush is covered with tiny green buds swaying to and fro on artfully arching stems. Magnolia trees in the village are coming to the end of their flowering, and they rain fragrant petals like snow. Wonder of wonders, the first bumble girls of the season have arrived, just in time to partake of the fragrant crabapple blossoms that are unfolding now.

What an exuberant trip springtime is! If I paused to take photos of every splendid thing we  encounter on our morning walks (and absolutely everything in the great wide world is splendid at this time of the year), we might not get home again for weeks.