Spring seems early but it’s just a week away

The beech leaves cling tirelessly to the branch tips throughout the winter and yield only when sprouting buds burst to unfold new leaves. Of course Spring knows no chronological start and stop date so toad and frogspawn releasing this year’s ‘taddies’ respect not the time’s of man. The strings of toad spawn’s twin lines of young and as yet unformed tadpoles lies limp and unmoving atop water plants as if devoid of life, yet within those transparent strings life pulses vibrantly in a quest to breath life as a newborn.

 

 

The lambs are growing strong and independent from their mother’s milk and warmth and flowers unfold from morning mist to welcome the early warmth of sunrise. The daffodils are filling the open lands around the castle now that the snowdrops have gone for another year. What bright yellow this “host of golden daffodils” William Wordsworth spoke of. Here is his sister’s account of what she and William saw as they walked in Ulswater:

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.



I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.

This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway. We rested again and again. The Bays were stormy, and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the sea.

—   Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal , Thursday, 15 April 1802

We ought not to take for granted the surroundings we are given, though often all too briefly we savour good things. I am so privileged to be here.