The Eastern Redbud Tree is common in Virginia around our offices there, and it is a truly beautiful tree in bloom. This is not it. The Redbud blooms purple. In early spring Redbuds look like purple smoke in the understory of Virginia forests and the margins of Virginia lawns.

This is the humble Swamp Maple, which really does have red buds, growing in an untended area along the catchment ponds of our industrial park. It was taken in the soft light of dusk, barely enough light for the camera to focus, at the long end of the zoom, from about 5 feet, which accounts for the interesting bokeh, and the slightly magenta cast to the reds. In fact, the light was low enough already to push the ISO to 800, which puts this shot in the “not possible a year ago with a Point & Shoot” category. It is great when the technology catches up to your vision, even by tiny steps.

Canon SX40HS at 840mm equivalent field of view, f5.8 @ 1/40th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and –!/3EV exposure compensation.

Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.

And for the Sunday thought. I love Maple blossoms. They appear on the branches well before the leaves, taping the last of last summer’s store of energy, braving late frost and spring winds, to stain the Maples with a tinge of the red they will carry in abundance at season’s end. They are always such a hopeful sign of the coming spring, among the first. And, close up, they are delicately beautiful…tight scaled buds, almost like tiny red pine cones, that open to miniature roses with long lacy filaments of red or yellow (depending on the species)…so small you have to be within inches to realize they are flowers at all. And of course, these tiny blooms are, most often, at the branch tips of massive maple trees, 4 stores high, and spreading over whole yards…or, in mass, shading acres of forest. The contrast could not be sharper.

They are brief…having seen these open in Virginia I can now see them, since I am looking, already formed on the branch tips of the Maple outside my window here in Maine, but they will not open here for several weeks yet. They will open, bloom a day, or a week at most, and be gone, as the leaves push right in behind them. (You will probably see more shots of them before long.)

I like them too, because, at winter’s end, they match the little blooming of my spirit. While we are here on Earth we are as much seasonal creatures, and creatures of the season, as is the rest of life around us…and this is true in the spirit as well. There is a spirit of winter, a spirit of spring…a spirit of each season. No, not that kind of “spirit of spring”…some kind of green leafy lady with a flower face…in the pagan sense. There is only one spirit…but that spirit is, in my experience, colored by the season. The hue of spring is hope. The hue of spring is quickening. The hue of spring is awakening. I feel it in my spirit as the days lengthen and the sun climbs…as the Maples bloom. Early and brave, despite the fact that winter storms are yet due, the Maples bloom. And so do I.