Bounties of a Beautiful Spring Day in North Idaho

I’d call it a sumptuous Spring Smorgasboard----a day filled with so many glorious sights and sounds that I found it difficult to choose which was best.

From start to finish, yesterday seemed like the world around was exploding with high-octane eye candy.  

Thanks to warm sunshine, spring blossoms unlike I’ve ever seen and an opportunity to go to a place where virtually every view in a 360-degree rotation offered yet another OMG, yesterday ranked right up there at one of the best of the best.

We have a plum tree that this year has burst out with thousands of blossoms and held them for several days. Every time I walk outside the garage, I’m mesmerized by that tree.  And, now another fruit tree over to the west of the house is following suit.

So, of course, grabbing an image of a horse standing within range of all those blossoms shouts out, “Hey, folks, spring has sprung!”

This is the most unusual, most beautiful spring I can remember in a long time.  

We may never have another of this magnitude in my lifetime----with lettuce taking off in a pot on the front porch, most trees leafing out a few weeks early and lawn already in need of its second mowing on Paul Revere’s ride day.  Wow!

Then, a trip up to Bonners Ferry to a place where Bill and a crew of Hondurans have been planting trees this week brought out more dramatically how far ahead we are in the weather timetable.  

Bill stopped the pickup and let me out on an expansive ledge overlooking the Kootenai Valley.  I would take photos while he gathered up tree-planting items on a hillside above.

With a few hours left of tree planting, scheduled for this morning, he wanted the materials in order for today’s work.  

So, he did his work and I walked the ledge and up the hillside, snapping photos, all the time marveling at the grand beauty of it all and pinching myself that I could stand in this place to admire the surroundings.

With the trees, surrounded by tubes of protective webbing, the hillsides have taken on the look of a mountainside cemetery.  

But there’s new life within each of those webbed monuments---thousands of seedlings and probably when I’m snoozing away in a cemetery somewhere, tall trees will stand overlooking the Kootenai River and its fertile farmland.

Twas a wonderful way to spend a rather warm spring afternoon, and I must say that the feel of some of those hillsides with southern exposure reminded me more of July than April 17.

“We’ll probably have rain all through May and June,” my sister said later as we were headed for Friday night dinner.

Could be, and it could be that what we’re experiencing right now will be but a lovely memory if those rains come.  

For now, we’re making the most of it, as the outside environment these days is pretty darned impressive and inviting.

Happy Saturday.  Enjoy the sun and this lovely spring.