“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”

• Rabindranath Tagore

Spring has finally sprung, we had a long cold hard winter. It still seems to want to hang on as the days get longer, we have bursts of warmth followed by old man winter with a last desperate attempt to hang on with a chilly cloudy gray day. This is the kind of winter that reminds me of why I do not like Illinois. The joke of waiting 24 hours if you did not like the current weather as it will change to something else. There was a few days this spring that had almost all four seasons at the same time. The previous year I was mowing grass in March, this year it was almost May when it first needed mowing. I am beginning to think we know less about the weather than we think we do.

This is an actual raindrop on a leaf, not enhanced by a spray bottle or some other trickery. I photographed one and it would fall off from wind and I had to find and photograph another one, and repeat until I got just the right one. Patience and time, something this photograph a day project takes quite a bit of. The lilac bushes are my inspiration of the day for this. They are finicky bushes if you ask me, only blooming on old growth and ending up overgrowing and almost dying out on their own. They require a thirds approach to proper pruning and maintenance and will fill in nicely and look very well. I of course did not know this and allowed them to become way to tall and not very good looking or blooming very well. The last three years of blooming were not good because of the overgrowth and then the massive pruning.

I like them even though my allergies do not like them very much. I enjoy all of my yard projects, pruning, trimming, shaping and have even started to make sure the grass looks the best that it possibly can. When I was younger I wanted nothing to do with it, now I take more and more pride in the way the yard looks. Of course there are only so many projects and so much that can be done in the course of a year. It truly amazes me that the older we get the faster time seems to go. Enjoy the first buds of spring!