First of all, thank you for your supportive words and thoughts on my post of a few days ago. Your comments, and the knowledge of your support, meant a lot to me. While the interceding days were far from what I would consider either restful or productive, I am feeling more like myself. I expect that it will take a long time to process the major events of the past few weeks. Perhaps I will have time to process some of my thoughts here, perhaps not.

In the meantime, I will do what I so often do: share a few unrelated photos.

Exactly a month ago, we welcomed the official start of Spring in the the northern hemisphere. However, in my own neck of the woods, Spring was heralded by snow. More snow. The crocuses I had seen beginning to emerge were buried. By the next day, the crocuses began to emerge through the snow. And within a few more days, the ground was (mostly) clear of snow, and the crocuses bloomed.

This photo was taken with my camera. For some reason, it has trouble with the particular hue of purple of the crocuses, and they appear bluer here than in real life. That sounds like a metaphor if ever there was one.

Here is a photo of those same crocuses, taken with my iPhone, looking more purple. (There is something wrong with the structure of that last sentence, but I have a headache, and can’t sort it out. Probably something to do with attachment ambiguity.)

I loved the sharp shadows cast by these little cobalt blue flowers in a neighbor’s yard. I do wish my iPhone had done better with the focus, here. My real camera could have done better with the focus set to manual, but I didn’t have it with me.

We have some very resilient periwinkle in our yard. It was here when we moved in. A few years ago, we had a landscape designer rework our front yard, and her plans included removing the periwinkle. I’m not sure exactly why, but I was happy to let her run with her vision. (I believe she was aiming to use native plants as much as possible, and vinca are not native to the US.) The periwinkle was removed and some new trees and shrubs were planted. Soon enough, though, the periwinkle came back up. But I was not unhappy to see it come back. I realized that I quite like its shiny green evergreen leaves, and its bright little purple flowers.

These are moss spore capsules, which shoot up in the spring, and will disappear soon.

More flowers, cheerful-looking narcissus, from the neighbor’s yard. (I was going to say they were cheerful, rather than cheerful-looking, but I don’t have any insight into their mood. For all I know, they could be quite grumpy.)

So, there you go. Cheery looking flowers.