I pity people who live where there are no seasons

....because for all the heat and freeze we put up with we are more than repaid with our glorious spring and fall.

The north light coming in my window is tinted fuschia by the masses of  blooms clothing the branches of the big old redbud tree just outside.  Do they clash with the red of the flowering crabapple and the last of the magnolia's pink and cream cups or the pink and white dogwoods? No. Nature's colors never clash, not even my neighbor's black maple whose early leaves are dark, bronzy red.

Forsythia, its arcing boughs decked out in golden trumpets, is always the first to announce spring's arrival.

Rain soaked lawns, suddenly emerald after a winter of beige, are sprinkled with crocuses' purple, white and yellow, blue grape hyacinth, and edged in daffodils all annnouncing the new season.  

Tulips show off their amazing panoply of satin colors from beds all over town. 

Yesterday my order of impatiens and  geraniums arrived.  The geraniums will be tiered on the baker's rack on the brick patio.  I will plant the impatiens just behind the curving row of bricks that edges the perennial garden around the back of the garden.  I call it 'faux' gardening because it looks as if I am a gardener, but it is really just the row of vivid color in the front and a parade of daffodils, Virginia bluebells, peonies, rocket phlox, hosta and day lilies that do  their thing through the summer months and into fall. 

I do plant annual herbs and flowers, often from seed gathered the previous autumn. I have an abundance of hollyhock, basil, marigold and zinnia seed. The hollyhock goes near the lattice fence that shields the patio, the zinnia in the sun where tulips bloom now. The remainder of my one sunny bed is my herb garden.  The basil, parsley, sage bush, and tarragon winter over, and the dill reseeds itself, but I replant basil every spring, and border the bed with marigolds to keep the rabbits and squirrels away.

Against the back fence is a long bed of native perennials with a few aliens.  Lots of echinacia, daisies, black-eyed susans, some beebalm and tickweed with its dainty yellow flowers fill that space.  Each year I try something new to see if it likes that location.  My goal is to have a bed that is so at home in the climate and soil that all will bloom faithfully like the wild flowers they are.

The Weather Report in the Midwest

... is never what one expects  because in the vast middle of the country weather sweeps in unpredictably from any direction; one day from Canada, the next from Mexico or Texas or Arizona or Colorado. Rarely from the east.Weather moves generally from west to east around the globe; something to do with the spin.

Meteorologists who can make it here can make it anywhere.  On top of the uncertainty of weather source, we are prone to floods, blizzards, hail, drought, and even tornados.  

Amazing that midwestern farmers are able to produce all the grain they do.  Farming is a chancy business in the best of circumstances but would you call the above "the best of circumstances?" Nor I.

I think farmers stay with it because it is a life of challenge lived in tandem with the natural world.  Our kind lived among wild plants and animals for most of our existence, and scientists now believe that in each of us is a deep longing for reconnection with the rest of the natural world. 

Most of us brainy apes are extremely detached from the real, i.e., natural world.  Often, our nearest approximation of it is a city park.  I imagine there are children who believe that all open spaces are covered with cropped green grass and that flowers bloom in cultivated beds everywhere.  

But, even in the densest, grayest city there is still a part of nature that is present to us always, and that is the sky above us.  It may be hazed over with smog and the stars may be made invisible by light pollution, but everyone can make connection with the heat of a sunny summer day, a blustering sleet storm, or a crisp day in Autumn when the air is cool and the sky is at its bluest.

Perhaps that is one reason that we are always interested in the weather report, accurate or not.  It is our remaining connection with the natural world.