(awwwww trillium:)
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Springtime!! Along with the riot of blossoms that started maybe a month ago with the bittiest crocuses and has now progressed into everything blooming all at once and new things every day, springtime is also the beginning of the bird return! Warblers, swallows, turkey vultures, osprey… Last Tuesday was my first turkey vulture sighting; Saturday was my first osprey sighting, and today I saw the two osprey again setting up shop on the Ross Island nest:)
Sadly, I lost my camera back in February in some random canyon in Nevada, so I haven’t really been taking pictures of all the flowers and buds and dramatic pour-on-you-one-second-sunny-the-next skies the way I usually would. Maybe it’s worth calling out, since it probably doesn’t make sense otherwise, that I don’t have a camera on my phone, so the loss of my real camera is essentially the loss of my picture-taking ability.
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(rainy blossoms near work, at Fort Vancouver)
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Is not having a camera, a way of recording a visual slice of time, inherently either good or bad? Is not having it anymore something that annoys me just because I’m used to having it and now I don’t, or is it because it’s actually nice to have pictures of this version-2023 progression of spring? The scientifically minded part of me says I’m missing a dataset of when things bloom; the opt-out-of-most-things-media part of me says if you don’t worry about recording it, maybe you actually pay better attention to it.
At any rate, I did actually buy a replacement camera though I haven’t decided yet if I want to keep it, and I do have a camera on my work phone, which is where these pictures came from:)
But the important thing here is not the camera or lack thereof, but the fact that pictures or no, the world is so, so lovely right now. We’ve planted our early veggies outdoors and I listen to birdsong from our porch in the morning when I eat breakfast out there (wrapped in a blanket still); every bike ride tends toward the gratuitous or the long way home. Every other house I walk or bike past smells amazing, and new colors and smells appear every day. The varied thrush have taken off for higher elevations (I miss them when I run in the mornings), but I’m excited to welcome back the osprey and swallows. Again I see bees and other flying insects, and I’m glad that I have a variety of flowers already going in the yard to welcome them back with nectar. It’s light for 12 and a half hours these days, and everything feels possible.
I’m never really sad about winter and all of its peacefulness (as James would say, “you love every season!”), but I do so very much love this coming alive of the world again:) Yay spring!!