Time Is Pressing

Time is pressing on everything. Plants are trying to grow. Deer and other wildlife are getting ready to raise this year’s families. Birds are migrating.

Spring is trying to shove winter out the door. Winter doesn’t want to leave. The more winter resists, the more time is pressing on everything to get going.

Already there are wildflowers blooming. This is the reign of the spring ephemerals, those plants that seem to leap out of the ground, bloom, set seed and disappear within a month or two.

Wayside speedwell, Veronica polita
I had thought this plant was corn speedwell. I was mistaken. It is similar, but is the wayside speedwell. This doesn’t matter much to me when I first see it in late winter or early spring as the flowers are the color of a summer sky with bits of white clouds.

One of the earliest is my summer sky bits of speedwell. I’ve seen these bloom in January when the weather warmed for a couple of weeks. These just started blooming as our warm spells this last winter have been only a day or two at a time.

In many ways this has been a mild winter. Lots of days would get up into the fifties. But nights were cold, in the teens and twenties. That’s good really as it keeps plants from blooming too soon.

Spring is on time, or seems to be, this year. I’m glad. In late springs all the spring ephemerals try to bloom at the same time. I can’t walk enough trails to see them all.

Nubian doe High Reaches Valerie
Nubian doe Valerie was supposed to milk all winter. Instead she cavorted with Nubian buck High Reaches Augustus on one of his great escapes. Now she is due sometime the end of March or beginning of April. Her kids will be for sale.

And time is pressing for me too this time of year. I want to go out walking to find the wildflowers. Yet the goats are close to kidding, the garden is close to planting time, the goat barn needs cleaning out, chicks will arrive in mid-April. And the fences need checking, another gate post needs shoring up, minor repairs beckon. It’s enough to drive a person crazy.

The spring list of projects seems too long. Time seems too short. Everything is important including the novel I’m struggling through.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the coming of Spring. I just wish it came with expandible days so I can fit more into each one.