Oh, this week has been quite perfect.  Blue skies every day, - warm sun and that lovely spring energy that urges you to be outside; tempts you into the garden even before the breakfast dishes are done!!!

I have been raking leaves, cutting down last year's dry flower stalks and poking around where

the earth is soft, looking for precocious pale green stubs, rich red folds of awakening peonies, and baby daggers amid last year's beds of iris.

Marvelous to have been released from gingerly treading on slippery ice to a springy step on dry ground!!

A wonderful drive on Sunday, over the Richter Pass and into the south Okanagan, 

looping up through Oliver and Okanagan Falls and then back on the

highway to the Similkameen.

All the baby calves and the beautiful naples yellow of the grasses, tinged with the emerging greens

of spring.  A sharp shinned hawk sits in the sun, with vigilant eye....

Too early, I know, but I imagined that aura of green that surrounds the poplar trees

before they burst into leaf!  And the gold of the willows as the sap rises!!

I have been very remiss in visiting in blogland, but the temptation to be outside 

has been overwhelming......

Tonight, as I came to the computer after a busy day outside, I found this

poem from Wendell Berry's  'Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems'

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

that possibility you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become a sort of grave

continuing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now and always.

And so you have become a sort of tree

standing over the grave.

Now, more than ever you can be

generous toward each day

that comes young, to disappear

forever, and yet remain

unaging in the mind

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

It seemed to describe so well and poignantly the space I now occupy.