Bill Felker

When locust trees flower, then snow-on-the-mountain blossoms and sweet Williams, clematis, and spiderwort open. White spotted skippers and red admiral butterflies visit the garden. Gold-collared black flies swarm in the pastures. Leafhoppers look for corn. Scorpion flies make their appearance in the barnyard.

Like love, spring can depend on the slightest movement, the faintest scent, a glimpse of what might happen, an oblique suggestion of fulfillment. And so the sight of one tulip or the first robin fledgling can create sudden spring, spring-at-first-sight. It can also grow and accumulate year after year like long, true love until each corner of its nature and each crevice of its devices are part of us.

When apple blossoms have all fallen, then the first sweet rocket, fleabane, sweet Cicely, daisy, fire pink, common plantain, white clover, chamomile, black medic, star of Bethlehem, lily-of-the-valley, sweet William, meadow goat’s beard, May apple, and wood sorrel are almost always open.

Poor Will’s Almanack for the Fourth and Final Week Of Middle Spring

When I went fishing in South Carolina with my nephew a few weeks ago, I took home with me. We drove for ten hours southeast into the mountains and then down into sun and milder temperatures.

Spring came on quickly as we approached Charlotte, with redbuds along the road and bright yellow Jessamine in the undergrowth. I found violet wisteria in Columbia. At Santee, not far from the coast, dogwoods and iris and azaleas were in full flower.

This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack for the Third Week Of Middle.

Thousands of sandhill cranes are leaving the Platte River area in central Nebraska this month, flying north to their breeding grounds. I went to see them a few weeks ago, arriving at the river in the evening.

The sky was full of great plumes cirrus clouds, the wind steady east, the water spinning around the sandbars beside me. And then the cranes came and came and came, always east to west as if guiding on the red setting sun.