I have no idea what these are called in English, or even whether they exist in England.  They grow wild here though.

Little more than a week ago, I was using the wood stove as well as the heat pump to keep the house comfortably warm. There was no longer a risk of the water pipes freezing, although the temperature might briefly have dipped below the freezing point outside during the night.  But it was uncomfortably chilly.  For the next days, however, I made do by simply shutting the door to the home office, where a row of inexpensive computers is churning away day and night.  Once the door was closed, the temperature gradually climbed to a comfortable level and eventually beyond.

The last couple days it has been too warm to comfortably keep my shirt on, unless I open the window and let the insects in.  The week between these two events is what we Norwegians refer to as spring.  Your spring may vary. It gets more extreme further north, although it may be an exaggeration when one humorist from Northern Norway could not remember the spring that year: “I was in the outhouse right then.”

Bee that as it May, the insects are out in force, but they are still badly understaffed.  Entire fields have become yellow seas of dandelion, or “popotan” as I like to call them.  (This is a childish mis-saying of their Japanese name, “tanpopo”. In Norwegian they are called “løvetann”, which means “lion-tooth”, which of course also is what dan-de-lion meant long ago.) Somehow the popotan always manage to set seed, with or without insect help, or so it seems.

The flowering trees along the road are also far too numerous for the few bees and bumblebees at this time of the year.  I am sure there will be more winged workers soon though, so please don’t give up!

I was surprised by just how plentiful these trees are here.  Back home we had a big one growing near where the river was making its way down the hill from below the mountain down to the bottom of the valley.  I remember going there each spring.  But of course it did not hold my attention long.  I had planet densities to memorize, and the Latin names of tropical insects I would never see. But young men and women would meet near these trees (not ours, as far as I know, but others like it). This makes sense, for I noticed today how the flowers smell like young women look: Sweet and yet fresh.  But when I was young, I did not consider that.  I was more interested in the mating habits of tropical insects. The male of the mantis, in particular, is known to lose its head completely when courting a hungry female.  There is probably a lesson in this.

The world is filled with beauty and books, and so I may be reading about the age of the Sun, and you may be living in it. May you love your life as much as I, or even more if you can.  The sun shines on saints and scoundrels alike, after all.