It was Mrs. Kemmick who directed my attention to the weather forecast Wednesday morning.
The way it looked, she said, we were going to have a fairly pleasant morning and early afternoon, followed by rain that might come and go over the next several days.
And you know what that meant, she said: all those delicate petals that had come to life on all those flowering shrubs and trees were probably going to be gone within several days. All those snow-white flowers, those flashes of purple, violet and pink, all the color on those cherry, crabapple and magnolia trees, all gone.
Ah, transient spring! O, fleeting life! And so on.
I won’t get that dramatic on you, but I did think I could perform a useful public service by putting together a gallery of photographs before it was too late. We never did get that rain, but we still might, and even a stretch of high wind could erase all that color.
So, if you haven’t been out much lately, this is what you’ve been missing. And in the coming months, long after the flowering season has ended, you can come back and remind yourself how beautiful it was.
We used to have a flowering crabapple tree in front of our house, and a flowering cherry tree, too.
We always said that if we ever sold our house we should try to do so when those trees were in bloom. Well, we did sell it, but not in the blooming season, and the person who bought it soon cut down both trees.
