The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Winter Spring

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Photograph from the Lower Meadow   © AW Trusty

   This time of year is notorious in our part of the country for its extremes in weather patterns and temperatures. We have delighted in a particularly early spring this year—tempering our joy with the knowledge that climate change conditions may have brought the premature profusion of budding and blooming flowers, trees and bushes. We take every opportunity we can to sit on the iron bench in the lower meadow immersed in the display of thousands of yellow narcissus which we and our neighbors have planted over the last twenty years. A. A. Milne expresses our thoughts perfectly:

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
"Winter is dead.”

   The daffodils have stood up to the battle of spring vs. winter withstanding below freezing temperatures and strong winds after unseasonably warm days, but they will face a challenge with tonight’s predicted low temperature. We may also lose the lilac and crab tree blooms we impatiently wait for through the winter.

   In every person’s life there are only so many springs. Perhaps making art is our meager attempt to witness and preserve the ungraspable beauty—something to remind us during grayer, darker times or when the season is cut short by Nature’s unpredictability—and, to say to the future that we were here.