I don’t tend to think of spring as my favorite season. Part of it is this stupid snobbism about how, well, come on, spring is so pretty and cheery, I mean liking springtime is so…Hummel figurine. It’s like liking Davy of the Monkees, or Paul because he was the cute one (for the record, Mike Nesmith and John, always John.)

As for summer, I’m scarred for life – not that I believe you can’t change, but 20 plus years of summer equals humidity that would drop an ox and mosquito attack dive bombers – and I can’t like summer that much. It’s vastly different when you don’t live in the climate I grew up in of course; and I do better in warm and dry than I do in cold and damp. But summer is for beach people and picnicking and volleyball and I’m none of those. Yeah I like picnics but when sitting outside is as complicated as it is for me – forget the ground, benches are so, um, unpadded, and well….

I have always loved autumn, even though it portends doom and it gets dark early and it’s all about gloom and the end of warmth and leading into that period when we all go to the mattresses in our little caves for several months and don’t we just love hibernating. But I’ve always loved the colors of autumn. And autumn has sounds, way different sounds than spring or summer. Leaf crunching is a wonderful noise. And while summer sunsets can just rock, autumn leaves – especially when there’s that one scarlet maple tree? I just love it.

So today, as I noodled over from the house to the post office (about 6 blocks, with a stop at Monkey Grind Espresso because Madame was out of half and half, and without half and half Madame cannot have her coffee and without her coffee, Madame is not happy. Besides, Madame had a migraine today and the caffeine really does help) I realized “damn, it’s April in Seattle and it’s SO PRETTY.”

I have to dislike it a little because it so gets to Stu – his allergies kick in and his “Rites of Spring as preformed by a man who cannot stop sneezing” – not to be missed, And there are usually sinus headaches involved and how icky is that. But the riot of color and just downright pretty stuff is what I like so about this city and about the climate.

People grow stuff here – everywhere. Almost everyONE. Flowering trees and rock gardens and flowers beds and bushes. We’ve got those traffic circles and the can be anything but well, nothing much to lovely little circular examples of northwest native plants. Like “ornamental kale” which I never in my life saw til I moved here. And winter pansies.

The Tulip Festival up in Skagit County, north of here is an annual celebration that begins with 2 weeks of daffodils, then goes to the tulip thing, then iris. It’s just gorgeous damn stuff. We went up with Jerry and Suzle in like ’91 or ’92, and Jerry proclaimed as we got closer to the area where you are going to see stuff “I’m not leaving until I’ve seen 10,000 tulips.” Then we went around a corner and bam. Time to go. Tulips from the edge of the road to the horizon; rows and fields and acres of tulips. Not usually very exotic ones; they’re red. Or yellow. Rows and rows; you can make out a few rows but then the colors just sort of blur and you can practically see Claude Monet with his easel sitting there. But then you go on and you stop at one of the big tulip nurseries and you wonder if your eyes can take the sensory overload. Because there are dozens – really honestly dozens of different kinds of tulips. Plain, single color ones. Ones with pointy leaves. Ones with pointy petals. Fringed petals. Two colors. Purple that’s almost black to creamy white and DOZENS in between. And you think, okay, I THINK, want. And I did – for several years I went nuts, planting 50 60 70 tulips. And it hurts that I can’t do it anymore. For several reasons but I don’t wanna talk about that.

I don’t know from flowering things; our state flower is the rhododendron; I grew up with mountain laurel. Pretty stuff. I have no idea what half the trees were on my way to the post office today; the poor little ones with the little pink petals that were falling with the slightest breeze; wake up in the morning and wonder for a second, til your brain kicks in, if it snowed pink last night. And trees with white flowers and vivid yellow somethings growing in a little rock garden (rock gardens are very popular here – some just have, well, rocks, while others use native plants and plants that grow well in crappy soil. Lots of the flowers are bright – yellow or purple. This serves to double for some people as rah-rah, since the those are the colors of the University of Washington. That of course is something I so don’t get, but there are people who care. Oy, do they.

Even the House of Tacky, which I passed on my way home, wasn’t too awful. The House of Tacky decorates for EVERY freaking holiday for which decorations are made – and hoo, boy, are there too many of those. The HoT’s idea of cute is to fill orange plastic trash bags that are vaguely decorated to look like jack o lanterns with crumpled up paper so they vaguely look like big jack o lanterns. And they hang plastic crap from the tree in the front yard, an put plastic rap on their door. Today, they just had some sort of bunny banner hanging. Either they’re cutting back or they haven’t had time to get their plastic crap for Easter out of storage.

But back I went, along different streets to see more things blooming and more petals on the ground and more color. Saw some cute flowers that looked sort of like mini-tulips. NO idea what they were but there they were, growing on the strip next to the sidewalk on one street. Nice stuff.