A walk in the sun...

Last weekend I took a walk with a friend, for the first time in two weeks, who is stressed out beyond what's healthy because she is still working, from home now, and as usual in American management these days they want more with less while giving mere lip service to how much they know more help is needed and they're working on it and oh, BTW, now that you're working from home you can be on duty and on the job any hour and all hours.  It was a nice pleasant, warm spring day with the verdant outside world of lawns and bushes bursting forth with the colors of the season of resurgence.

We went three miles and listened to birds chirping and watched whole families bicycling by single file, dad in front and mom bringing up the rear, like a couple of ducks shooing ducklings across a roadway, and just worked off the gloominess and despondency of always being inside with no physical contact with others (she lives alone, as I do, and that induces a special languor that easily settles into a blue funk not overcome by calls to or from your friends).  We saw a thirty-something man come out of his home in his green scrubs and get into his car at the curb and called out to him from a safe distance inquiring if he was was going to work, and when he indicated yes, we called out to him to Be Safe.

Everyone maintained respectful distances from everyone else, except for some more closely spaced couples or family units, and mostly went to opposite sides of the street as persons passed by other persons.  And almost everyone had a mask on, the new norm which could be with us for years going forward.

There was some good news.

 My last walk took me past a house whose front yard was littered with little riding devices of all sorts, a baby seat, bicycles, tricycles, little scooters, plus pet containers like water bowls, and I wondered if the parents inside were able to cope with all those kids cooped up on the premises (plus doing the cooking, cleaning, homeschooling etc.) and as we walked by that house, the parents were in the yard, alive, well and apparently ably managing the chaos created by four young children, three dogs and any stray tiny friend that wanders by or in.

The tulips of spring

Now that spring is done, looking back I did participate in certain traditional springtime viewings in the District.

I walked through the National Tulip Library bed, enjoying the colors of the multi varied flowers there.

It's by the Tidal Basin, so you can get a two-fer by circumventing that body of water, viewing the blooming cherry blossoms along the water and affording yourself the pleasure of seeing the nearby emerging tulips as well.

I like seeing the outliers, in this picture a single red tulip that somehow got into a white tulip bed to the left of center.

The colors of spring

On the last day of spring, here are the colors of spring.

The perennials I planted last year.

Any run down any street in town shows nature's beauty.

The District especially reveals springtime's riotous colors.

Spring

I saw some blue cylindrical flowers with what looked like tiny bells hanging from its central column that I liked last year at the U.S. Botanical Garden, and when I saw them at the Home Depot a little later, I bought a couple of pots and planted them. It was the first planting I've done around my house, besides trees or bushes, for a decade or more.

I noticed one cylindrical head protruding from the earth a few days ago, then on the first day of spring a few more flowers joined that first pathfinder. My friend says they're liriope and it looks great and I feel great, a new start.

More flox

The creeping phlox flowerbeds are much more robust this week, at their peak.

I run past them on my runs, sometimes stopping to photograph them, sometimes snapping them as I run by.

Virtual movement downstream, flowing, cascading.

Very beautiful.

Flox?

The cascading phlox flowers flowed down the embankment and fell off the wall like a waterfall.

Colors sparkled on the sloping flowerbed, reminiscent of sun-dappled water.

This corner in my hometown is my favorite spot to run by at this time of the year.

The colors of spring.