Heart strings

Trees leaf. Oaks unfurl and gently reinforce their defences with tannins. The hornbeams have reached opacity. Horse-chestnuts have become unlikely candelabra just as apples are beginning to drop their pale pink confetti.

On the lush lawns yearlings are leaving foalhood as they started it, nuzzling their mares milky teats. The new crop is near to dropping, all legs and fluff soon.

I picked my mandolin this morning, second time in three weeks? Breakfast's sugar shock shaking my strumming arm, missing strokes; fret fingers too soft; remembered chords with no rhythm

litters

After two days warm, in the sun, the journey on Tuesday morning was on drying roads. Under the melding deciduous canopy the road held fine vernal litter. Brown stipules under the beeches, green male flowers under the maple and the microscopic allergenic dust (for those who suffer hay) sprinkled the ground, adding to the colour pallette growing richer with the season.

I saw the first foal, a Shetland, Wednesday; in the sunshine before the day cooled and softened into a hazy, sleepy evening.

Yesterday broke bright and sunny, but the demoralising predictions of the weather folk came to fruition and, though sun and blue pushed past my window into mid morning, they were driving on the edge of stormy weather that occasionally dominated, to soak and wash the fresh spring colours clean again. Herds of herbivorous mammals on the lawns and heaths were having their hair gently ruffled on my morning drive. The evening was accompanied by angry rattling of things not tied down, the flapping of sacks, the hiss of airborne particles blasting glass.

Stiller this morning, clouded, damp. I foolishly woke for the start of the morning chorus; territorial shouts, avian wolf whistles and calls to arms.

First cut (2013)

It was a 9 boxer, but a bit brutal, a bit functional. No edges, just the centre; all the posts and trees still wear their cuffs. Unfortunately I met a frog on the way, but it wasn't one of those embarrassing encounters where you just disable a leg and have to watch them hop in circles because you are too squeamish to finish the job properly, no. It was a proper brain pate event.

It was only a week ago on Friday that I noticed the leaves breaking on the apple trees. That weekend there was a peacock butterfly and a comma. Monday I saw that the custard maple was flowering. Pink cherry opened cheekily last week, to drop and carpet the floor before a light shower on Friday that swept up all the petals to piles.

Some camellias have bloomed patchily this year, looking as though the frost scorched their buds at the wrong time. The tulip flowered magnolias though seem unscathed and are bright beacons in gardens everywhere.
I passed a ditch this morning, lined now with slowly baking green slime. whether due to drainage or the last three dry weeks I don't know, but I seem to remember water in that ditch for a year - since it began to rain last April.

I snook a morning away from my desk and went to almost paddle by the sea. Wearing a jumper, but feeling warm in shelter, I sat a few minutes and groomed beach gravel; just long enough to find a fossil tooth. The folk there were all cheery; happy to share the sun and a few words each according to their need for solitude and the sea. I could have stayed, but I had the wrong sandals and nothing to drink and the usual lingering guilt.

Dancing

As I drove the pothole polka across the village, a flurry of fluffed ice crystals danced out of the slipstream of the car in front, looking like nothing in the cold dry morning so much as the fall-out of a high altitude pillow altercation.

I was reflecting on Monday, as I drove past the Spring gently freezing into sparkling rims round the still puddles, how fortunate we are here. Too Easterly for the South Western snow; too Westerly for the South Eastern. Too far South to enjoy the Northern snow now coating Cumbria and drawing, like a damp unwelcome blanket, as far as the knees of Basingstoke at the weekend. Not, in the bitter wind that has chivvied us back in the door after a single lap of the lunchtime building, in the Goldilocks Zone, by any (except the fevered physicist's) stretch of the imagination, but better off than most.

The distant, pink camellia is showing opening buds down the garden, joining the red in the front now showing its colour all around, not just against the single-glazed window pane's microclimate. Under the busy bird feeder clematis is climbing and blackbirds are building again in the garage ivy.

In the dusk, setting

My neighbour's security light flicks into action at every passing car, themselves shining eye-scorching beams East, but even so, fail to prevent this morning's pony theft of rubbish bags.

At 19:10, bare feet slowly losing heat to the gravelly driveway, just above the nearby chimney, West; C/2011 L4 Pan-Starrs I salute you, and also use my left hand to steady binoculars.

A corner turned

Glowing white stems and a purple haze coating their terminal branches; these trees look more like Factory produce than young stands of sibling saplings self seeded across the heaths. Alien in the springing morning light beams cast by our orange star, partially occluded by cloud banks and the edge of the Earth. The silver birch, still remembering the gold pennies of their cast off clothing already dream of the coming solar energy boom, wriggling toes deeper into loam. Photosynthesising gowns still locked against the worst of winter; ice and the weather's wind tsunamis driven by alternate vortices, Siberian and Saharan blasts, oceanic and continental.

Inundated

I take the back road this morning, both for some quiet reflection and to avoid the queues of cars driving slowly through escaped rivers now flowing over bridges in the Forest. Black waters inundate the roads but they remain passable with a care I abandon on some straights, aquaplaning from island to low island across the heaths. The concentration required to do this saves me from self examination. Like the water flowing across novel waterways, my reflections are fragmented by undertows and currents.