Spring is blooming everywhere - lilacs, bleeding hearts, irises, lily of the valley, honeysuckle. I go on long bike rides weaving my way down side streets with my camera in my pocket, looking for what is blooming now. Each week it is something new. At school, Raphael, six years old, tells me each morning that the sun is blooming. And I believe him. I think that is what it does in his language. And now, in mine, too. It blooms! When I was small, I trailed my mother through greenhouses in the spring - deciding the flowers I liked best by their names. Bleeding hearts always scared me - not the hearts themselves but the little tear drop at the bottom and their name. I thought they were weeping. At some point, between now and then, I fell in love with them, and with every other sign of summer's arrival. I wait all year long for it to come.

New Blue Bike

My new blue bike, I think I am in love with it - something new, something blue. Sky above me.

Ground beneath. Me in between, connected to both, balanced, kind of floating on thin silver wheels that shine in the dark. In early April, when the snow had just gone, I met a little boy on the sidewalk, maybe 5 years old. He introduced me to his bike: "He's four days old," he said, patting the handle bars, sitting on the seat, stretching his legs, balancing on his little toes. Such joy! A new bike! I just had to have one. And now I do. I want to stop strangers on the street and say, "She's fourteen days old today!" I had forgotten how good new things can be. Particularly when the world is green and blooming, which it is right now. In spring, I always wonder how we can possibly call what we do all through the rest of the year, "breathing". I think what I do all year long is hold my breath and wait for spring! I am breathing now . . .

I'm Back

I'm back. Don't know exactly where I have been, but it was not a green place. And now the world is getting greener each day. Spring! My favourite season of the year. The tulips my mother planted at my backdoor last fall, on the last sunny October day, are blooming - seemingly brand new, although, I think, each of those bulbs had a long history of birth and rebirth. The sedum beside them is a thick and sturdy green. April was warm - sunny day after sunny day. And now May has arrived with showers. Cool and damp, but just what all the growing things need.

The flowering shrubs all along back lanes, are blooming, and soon my kitchen window will be filled with the blossoms of my neighbour's apple tree. Can there possibly be a better time to walk through the world with wide open eyes, to have them opened again? So much to see and love! Each time Spring happens it is like the first time - "the leaping greenly spirits of trees," the "blue true dream of sky," "the birth/day of life and of love and wings." Spring is back. I am back!