Talk Thursday: Imaginary Spring

Nothing is more lovely than springtime in Oregon. Okay, maybe fall in Oregon.... Or fall in Vermont (not that I've ever seen it myself.) But, I love spring. Spring is a million shades of green and the smell of rich soil during a mid-day shower. Spring is nature screaming "Here I am!"

This weekend was Ducky's birthday and an excuse to drive home to mom's. Probably my second favorite way to spend an hour and a half. I love that drive, but in the early spring it's so much better.

Highway 126 aimlessly winds it's way from the Willamette Valley, through the Coast Range mountains, over rivers and streams, to end itself at Highway 101- roughly two miles from the beach. The greens are amazing. I am impressed with the number of plants and trees I know the names of and awed by the vast amount I don't know. God, I love this drive.

The valley itself is rich. Vineyards and orchards are plentiful. Further up the I-5 corridor you come to grass seed country. I think I've got to live in one of the greenest cities in the country. It's hard to find an area that doesn't have trees. In a month it will start snowing cherry blossoms and the streets will be covered in a blanket of pink.

Leaving the city behind, you immediately find yourself in farm country. Plush green pastures (dotted with cows, horses, and the occasional sheep) divided by patches of deciduous forest bright with new greenery. The rolling green hills are crowned with tight groves of maple, oak, alder, apple, and walnut- each with their own color pallets of leaf, bark, and moss. The way the sun breaks through the clouds to shine down in that magical way- I'm certain that from deep within these groves I can hear the "Hrum, hoom, hm" of the Ents that surely dwell within.

Climbing the foothills brings douglas firs towering above the leafy green, while shrubs and vines spread through the spaces between. Elderberry, apple, dogwood, and thimble berries add their flowers of white. No where can you find a patch of bare dirt, even the rocky cliffs sprout their ferns and wildflowers where the crevices catch the dirt and the dirt grabs seed. Higher still, the mountain sides are like patchwork quilts of bright, light, and vibrant greens backed with thick orderly rows of dark reforested fir. As the hillside drops away from the road, I look down into the thick forest of tree trunks reaching forever down to the valley below and then forever up to the branches that block out the sun. Each trunk is thickly swaddled in blankets of golden-green moss. If I were a hobbit or a dwarf, my house would be down there with nothing but the birds and the babbling brooks to keep me company.

As the coastline draws nearer elderberry gives way to blackberry and rhododendrons heavy with buds begin to announce the end of the line. In about three weeks the length of 101 will be cotton candy pink with their blooms. The maple and alder trees have given way to more fir and pines start to appear. Amazingly, the only plant to feature consistently throughout the journey from valley to mountaintop to sandy beach has been the obnoxious scotch broom heavy with it's rich buttery buds. And I wheeze. Oregon is an allergist's dream come true.

You can't say that spring is imaginary. If you can't see spring, then you can smell it and hear it in the voice of the birds on the wind. Spring has come!