Spring is in the air (finally!)

My bleeding hearts have resuscitated and might even sprout one or two tiny hanging blood-red hearts to my silly delight.

Still, the cruelty of this winter is apparent in our crab apple tree, which by this time last year had flowered so majestically that we didn't tire of taking picture after picture after picture. The flowers, this year, are small and they barely cover the tree, unlike last year. Back then, the tree looked like a bouquet of bright white wedding-perfect flowers. This year, the tree is almost bare. But it does have flowers. And they are still pretty and smell good. So they will do.

There's no doubt that spring is finally stirring everywhere, from the curling-lipped tulips and the late-sprouting daffodils, to the blood-red cardinals chasing each other across our yard to the sun-bright male Gold finches doing likewise in the front of the house. It must be mating time in the bird world because the males are a lot more contentious than usual. The male sparrows continually push and shove each other out of the feeder and, when they fall off, they fluff themselves, trying to make themselves bigger than they are. It's rather funny, actually.

Have you ever seen cardinals face off? They do so like cats, lowering their crests, like cats do their pointy ears, and crouching, like cats do when getting ready to pounce. Once I had to shoo two fighting cardinals off the middle of the street, where they were likely to be flattened by one of the many idiot drivers who speed through our quiet alleyways. They wouldn't have time to notice the two jewel-red birds getting ready to rumble.

We've even had our first thunderstorm last night, with lighting hissing and crackling so near that the glass windows rattled with each guttural growl of thunder, like a large monster was trying to get into the house by pushing itself against our windows. I don't like thunderstorms. Something in my reptilian brain, that brain that harks back to our lizard days, cringes and cowers each and every time. My more advanced brain knows there is no reason to be afraid but tell that to my lizard gray matter. It doesn't listen to me.

That's despite the best efforts of my father, who would bring us all together during spring and summer thunderstorms to sit in front of the large sliding glass door in the study so we could watch the storm unfold. His thinking was that watching the lighting paint patterns in the sky would make us less afraid. And while I'd much rather watch storms than feel them, I'm still scared to the bone. Sometimes I think I'm more scared than Rusty, who once tried to paw himself through a wall in our closed bedroom during a particularly violent storm a few years ago.

But thunderstorms are a sign of warmer weather. So they will do (as long as they don't turn into deadly tornadoes, of course).