Spring Has Sprung

Spring has sprung,

The grass has ris',

I wonder where all

The flowers is?

Horrible.  I know.  You can blame my grandfather for that one. 

Spring has arrived for sure here in the northwest.  Does that mean the flowers are blooming and the leaves are budding?  Heck no!  Spring is more subtle here.  More intermittant. 

It still snows now and then, between bouts of rain, but the hard frozen ground has turned to soft clay mud.  The grass is overridden with moss that will soon give way to the grass proper as the ground slowly dries.  The bulbs are just starting to push up through the soil, the first tentative green leaves beginning to show outside our laundry window.

There are the more traditional signs as well. The birds are definitely back, as my daughter's cat can certainly attest.  Rows and V's of ducks and geese have begun to fly overhead, returning from whence they came six months earlier.  The duck ponds at the City parks are full again, only this time with leaner versions of the autumn-fattened birds we saw leave. 

And really, only one thing truly screams "Spring!" to me in Spokane, and like the real harbinger of autumn, it's human in origin.  Often the first sign of real spring around here is the sprouting of oddly clumped blooms on my mailbox and in the seam of the storm door.  These brightly colored missives are the annual inundation of cheaply-xeroxed flyers for yard service, hauling services, handyman services, and something that triggers unwanted visions of Richard Simmons in overalls, a service called "power raking."  (Incidentally, don't do it.  It's HORRIBLE for your grass)

Spring has definitely sprung.  Now it's time to recycle the unwanted flyers and get to the business of waking up the ground.  Planting here we come!