Spring

Early spring in Montreal.

It looks a little bit like Antarctica:

Except for all the plants.  Frozen under, sprouting through crusts of ice and squelching in the mud: so many plants.  So much chlorophyll, waiting for the sunshine.

Some of the animals are already into it before the snow thaws.

Others, like this raccoon, seem to need a little moment to gather themselves.  He was standing three feet off the cross-country ski path, blinking blandly and looking like he might need a cup of coffee.

No coffee necessary for the waxwing; he's already dressed for the party.

Ditto the great blue heron, the redwing blackbird and the pileated woodpecker… all spotted within Montreal city limits.  

I think I'm going to like life in Quebec.  The people, like those year-round resident birds and early returning migrants, don't seem to stand on ceremony when it comes to celebrating the season.  The first day the thermometer crept up past freezing, our unknown neighbor, red-nosed and mittened in the still-brisk air smiled at us broadly on the street and proclaimed, "Le printempts est ici!"  Or anyway, that's what I think he said… I've got a long way to go on my French.

After securing ourselves an apartment in our new city, Tyler and I spent several weeks in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, watching spring unfold further.  It started with the skunk cabbage, and quickly proliferated from there… oh, the plants!  The plants of spring!  How can anyone bear so much green and yellow and color?  Suffer brightly with me:

We watched the forest blossom, blueberry barrens buzzing with bees, the tiger swallowtail butterflies clinging to the northern bush honeysuckle.  The columbine, the fringed polygala and the lady slipper peeking from between the umbrellas of the wild sarsaparilla.  We ate several rounds of fiddleheads, powering up with forest nutrients, and then cracked the guidebooks, trying to learn about everything around us.  One month ago I could name only a dozen wildflowers, but in the weeks since, I have listed 50 or so from around the midcoast region of Maine.  The names of trees are coming more slowly, perhaps because I have to look up and away from the wildflowers to study them closer.  The birds are all hidden in the foliage, and we took to lying on the dock and staring back up at the canopy, waiting for warblers to hop briefly between perches.  A glimpse of bright yellow almost always meant a Yellow Warbler, but closer looks occasionally reveal Pine Warblers or Goldfinches.  In lieu of definitive glimpses, we began to get better at identifying bird calls.  The most ethereal bird call in the entire forest is the Hermit Thrush.  For weeks, they haunted our hikes, sounding like magic flutes beckoning us deeper into the forest.  Then, Julia and Schuyler came to visit, and Julia, who is normally busy cramming her brain with the finer points of grammatical structure in ancient languages, confidently identified the Hermit Thrush as the only bird she knew by song.  The Ovenbird, the Eastern Wood Peewee… we know a few now.

And in between studying bird calls, botany and French, we went swimming.  

I Went to the Great Northwest and This is What I Saw

First impressions of my new country: everything in the Canadian Rockies is bigger and craggier than anything south of the border.  Everyone is so dang friendly.  The air smells clean and I like it.  We spent several nights in a lodge in Yoho National Park.  Half these photos were taken around Emerald Lake, and the other half at Lake Louise.  Sometimes the smaller trees have curly tops.  Sometimes you are driving along, and suddenly you see a tree that looks like it has a gigantic marshmallow on top, but it turns out to be a hunk of snow.  Watch out for chutes and avalanches!  We saw so many pretty winter birds: a Three-Toed Woodpecker, some Nutcrackers, and our old friends the Snow Buntings.  AND.  We finally heard the American Dipper sing his most sweet and amazing song!!  Is there anything like rounding a corner and finding a tiny, rotund bird with his feet planted in a freezing cold stream, singing away with all the joy in the world?  It is entirely different from swinging your headlights into a parking lot at night and spotting a herd of lady elk hunkered in the snow drifts, which is instead a scene of awesome quietude.  I am happy to accept either experience in the course of a day, thank you world.

We have journeyed, slowly, up the coast from San Diego to Vancouver and then east to Montreal.  Several years ago, I drove the opposite direction from Vermont to St. Louis and then eventually Portland, OR.  I thought I knew what to expect, but somehow I was still startled seeing the topography in reverse.  And mentally, there is a really curious thing I am finding about seeing what is here in Canada, instead of the Unites States… its like I never really imagined Canada to be anything but a hat of land sitting on top of the country I grew up in.  But Canada!  Gee whiz.  I had no idea, not one single clue.  And I have been here before… it just feels totally different now that I can stop anywhere I want and just live there if I like it.  Some farm town in Saskatchewan.  Some forest in Manitoba where the Great Grey Owls hang out.  Some French paper mill town in Northern Ontario.  Wherever!  

We're stopped here in Montreal for the time being.  We'll get ourselves signed up for some free French classes and see how that goes.

Look who else we saw:

Also, this is a rabbit print in the snow: