SPRING HAS SPRUNG...

I hope I can remember the rest of the ditty. Let me try:

‘Spring has sprung the grass has riz, I wonder where the birdies is.” My mom would rhyme this off with her wonderful sense of humor.

Now this is the first morning when stepping out the door, you feel spring is almost here.

Almost because first thing in the morning there is a slight touch of cool in the air. Think what’s ahead and it can’t but bring a smile to our faces.

Not only that but there’s this patch of blue flowers clumped near us under the trees. Look close and there are buds on the branches around us.

It’s when one cannot help but wonder what wonderful things come back to life at this time of the year. How do those branches know when it is time to get to work? What comes up from the ground inside them that gives them life? Trees, bushes, even weeds are coming alive before our eyes.

Leaves will come next. These will block out house perched up on the other side of Clarence Street and we'll be alone on our wooded hill for the next six months.

Author’s comment: Amazing to think I used to camp on this wooded hill when I was a kid. I’d pack up my sleeping bag telling my mother I’d be gone over night. She would wrap her arms around me and give me a tight hug. She’d say, “See you tomorrow.”

I must have been close to ten years old. It never dawned on me that she'd worry about me going off into the night. Years later I learned she did but I’d be the last to know. She was Louise Burritt Lockhart from the uppity Rosedale area in Toronto when she met my dad. He was a clergyman from the small town of Woodbridge, Ontario. Amen to that.