Intermission 3 - By Sylvia -Annual Spring Forward

My Special Guest writer is my wonderful wife Sylvia.  Sylvia Just launched her new website.  If you want to take a look.  You can visit https://sylviapauls.com/ and you'll see some of her art and she also has a blog to view.  And now on to the post of the day!

Annual Spring Forward to Daylight Savings Time

(My Perspective)

Our Pauls Spring Forward is more likely to resemble Spring Behind. We are one day into the official Spring season, and already we feel we are part of the “Left Behind”, a humorous nod to a Christian movie about the rapture.

Yesterday, while the sun lit up our front yard for the afternoon, we had a wonderful person who volunteered to come over and coach us on pruning our ancient heritage apple tree so that it will produce more apples the size they are supposed to be, instead of the crabapple size we have seen since moving here. The size difference is due in part by the over abundance of tall and leafy branches choking out the nourishing sunlight and stealing nutrients from the making of apples to just more leaves.  In addition, Nova Scotia Power came by last summer and did their own version of “pruning” half of our tree that had risen above the power lines. Their pruning, while necessary, was a play on Dr. Frankenstein’s restructuring of his monster child, leaving our tree looking more like a tilted hedge with bald spots. Our severe drought last summer didn’t help the poor struggling dwarfed apples either.

Suffice to say, after the few major thick branch removals by this fellow and Steve’s chainsaw (together with my constant cringing, silent apologizing to the tree, and dumping the unlucky twigs into the tractor bucket), our signature front yard fruit tree has begun to look like those you see in a real orchard: lower, wider, and lots of light flowing through the middle. We apparently need to wait a few weeks for the buds to start showing so we can hand-prune some of the smaller dead branches away.

On my way around the house to get supplies and tools for this job, I noticed the good, and bad of my snow-bare gardens. 

The Bad: winter came early here and so I have lots of perennial grasses and lilies whose dead stalks from last year need to be cut back. Also some huge hosta plants along the side of our house are shooting up buds. Every year I say I need to split them and move them, and every year they grow too fast and big and I miss that crucial window to split without crushing mature leaves. I’m already behind on this stuff.

The Good: My little brother was born the day after Spring. Happy birthday Stan!! 

A courier dropped off an amazon package on the other side of our house. As I exchanged pleasantries with the driver, my eyes shifted to a little side garden that only last week was snow covered and devoid of life. Yesterday - I saw two huge clumps of tiny tulip leaves pushing the mulch aside to reach the sun, and some lilies making the same effort! What a difference a day makes, eh?

Even though we’re expecting cold weather and the odd snowflakes to continue for at least another week or so (one never truly knows the weather in a coastal region), SPRING has arrived, and with it, a long list of “do it now or never” outdoor chores are waiting for our hands to accomplish before the window closes and we’re back to finishing the barn siding in stroke-worthy heat.

All this to say, the time change may have moved an hour forward, but we are a little behind by a few days or week. Ahl well - it’s SPRING!!! A bible verse encapsulates my heart’s waiting and longing this season as it always does. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says “God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Spring will eventually come in full bloom and our gardens will be ready to show off (after more snipping and hopefully splitting - hey Steve can you please help with the latter??).

HAPPY SPRING EVERYONE!!