it had me low, it had me down,
I viewed the morning, with much alarm,
the drive to school, had lost its charm...
... until I realized that the thick mist made me imagine this: instead of dodging rush hour in Olney, I was floating through an exotic, romantic locale. The open fields along Bowie Mill Road reminded me of fog rolling across the moors in Wuthering Heights. Riding up and down the hills of Queen Elizabeth Drive made me believe (with a stretch) that I was in San Francisco. And the tree-lined, rural section of Georgia Avenue above Brookeville transported me to Huang Shan of Anhui, China or the hazy redwood forest where Ewoks lived in Return of the Jedi.
By afternoon, the sun cleared away the fog and exposed the blooming cotton-like flowers of my neighborhood's pear trees. Gorgeous daffodils, bright hyacinths and even my fledgling tulips (which survived the traumatic transplanting described in my blog entry from May 4, 2011, "Tiptoe Through The Tulips") decorated the landscape.
Nonetheless, the fantasy of faraway lands had to end. My daughter brought me back to reality when she asked about the pear trees, "How can trees so pretty be so smelly?" Ants and stinkbugs appeared everywhere inside the house. Welcome back to Olney and welcome back to spring ... it never seemed to have left.
