SPRING SNOW

A few days ago, as I left the house to run some errands, I saw that it was snowing.

March snowstorms are uncommon in the Atlanta area, but they’re not completely unheard of. This was a bright sunny day in the low 70’s, however, and the local weathermen hadn’t been predicting the end of the world... so what was going on?

It was a storm of petals.

The Bradford pears and cherry blossoms, having been in bloom for the past couple of weeks, were now shedding those blooms. They fluttered down gently, coaxed by a soft breeze.

I thought back to the previous year, when a violent rainstorm knocked all of the blossoms off the trees in a single day. This was different. This was... beautiful.



The tree-blossoms lie now in drifts along our driveway. Soon they’ll turn brown, shrivel up, blow away, and become part of the soil, eventually becoming the constituents of future flowers. But meanwhile, they provide a gentle reminder that Spring is here at last.