Monday 18 April 2005

Pic of the day: No leaves yet, but the first flowers on the trees. Luckily I am not allergic to this type of pollen.

Slow spring

The trees are nervously, tentatively making their way toward spring. The different species have come differently along, and plants in the sunnier southward slopes have a lead. But the buds are growing and starting to change color. It has surely reached a level where there is no going back.

When spring comes here in Norway, it is often really sudden. It can happen in a matter of hours: Once I went to work wearing a jersey and an outer jacket, and went home in my shirt and it was still warm. Such a heat wave tends to kick the forest into an explosion of green, where you can see from day to day how the color changes. (And here is a lot of forest.) Up until then, however, the process is gradual and careful. That's how it has been this year. I can see from my earlier diaries that this is not a particularly early year, even though the winter has been quite moderate. The frost was not deep and did not last all that long, and the snow was fairly late and disappeared some time ago. But the heat wave hasn't come yet. And so the trees remain shy.

There is no deeper meaning to this entry, by the way. I just thought that if I lived to see more springs, I would want to look back and know how this one was. Or not was.