Nature has an app that works pretty well year in and year out. Once in-a-while, it gets snarled up but hey, "that's life"---or as they say in midtown Manhattan, "You'll have that from time to time, yes you will." Already, I hear my mid-town and upper west side friends racing to get back to the steel pilings in South Hampton, Riverhead and Brentwood. Hello, Mike! Hello, Steve. Hello, Denis. This could be very confusing, but there is a Steve in Riverhead and one in S. Hampton. Denis in Brentwood and another Mike in the Westbury area.
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| The white flowering trees are fully out as well as red buds like this. |
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| The Daffodils |
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| This is Winfrey Point, the highest point at White Rock Lake. During WWII Winfrey Point was wooden barricks that served as a prison camp for Rommel's North African Army. (The Desert Fox's men lived at Winfrey Point as prisoners.) |
Red bud trees, flowering trees, new growth are showing up all over the Metroplex. And--get this--there has not been a single day in February that has hit the freezing mark. Spring, my friends, has sprung!
When that happens, it even has an official measure. A measure that says that spring moves northward at a calculated rate of approximately 20 miles per day. Ironically, when the leaves begin to turn up north, the peak colors move south at a rate of approximately 20 miles per day. Now, that's an app that mother nature perfected eons ago. Amazing. It's truly amazing. But, you take the facts that the Tropic of Capricorn that is the southern most point that the sun reaches on that first day of winter; spring or fall occur when the sun crosses the equator and of course,when the sun hits that most northern point that is know as the Tropic of Cancer, we have summer and the southern hemisphere has winter. In other words, the northern and southern hemisphere are in reverse. So the old Celtics, Mayans and other early cultures payed attention to those things in order to live. Now, we just take things for granted and don't even stop long enough to say thank you.
So, here's to spring 2017. May it be everything we anticipate. Anything more---well, that's just a gift don't you think?
