Genus Galanthus, the first ones to appear every year.
Primavera is not a pasta dish. At least it wasn’t a pasta dish first. It’s a great Italian word…it’s fun to say. It sounds like it should, one of many words that does…opulent, cramp, beetle… It requires some lingual finesse and those words all are fun to say. I like words, and I confess that I sometimes read dictionaries for pleasure.
It is, of course, originally from Latin, prima (firsts) and vera (springs), the singular being primus and ver. No Italian worth their cannoli would be caught dead saying a word as ugly as primusver. If you care, the ver comes from the same root word as vernal, as in Vernal Equinox. I can’t help but think there’s some green (verde) in there too. Go back even further to Prot0-Indo European and the word is wesr.*
Spring has been here for a few weeks, but in my mind in only arrived today. That’s when I crawled around on my belly and took pictures of emergent plant life. After a long, hard, cold Wisconsin winter, it always amazes me when anything survives a five-month dirt knap.
The Sanguinaria canandensis is up. The leaves are up, but the flowers are the white buds that will soon accelerate and and overtake the leaves. A little explosion of white makes the Bloodroot a cheerful early arriver. Its name means Bloody Things from Canada. Canada sends us lots of plants and animals, apparently. Slap canadensis on the end of any Latin word and you have a new species. Like Homo cervasae canadensis (Beer-drinking Canadian). They are quite common.
The Trout Lilies are up too (can’t remember the Latin right now). Just the first peek of a leaf, but the flowers will come soon. The spotted leaves earn the lily its name, not the flower, and I love the speckled leaves as much as or more than the actual bloom.
Yeah, so there’s the big stuff (relatively speaking). Lovely, yes, but the thing that astounds me during Primavera are the primal forces that propel and drive life from the cold and inhospitable ground. Life is everywhere. The Sun does its part to warm things up, but somewhere inside a seed so small you can’t see it without a 10x magnifier loop is a powerful and unstoppable impulse to grow to the light. Those little two-leaved seedlings are everywhere if you look.
Yes, they are that small, and two days ago they weren’t there.
So yeah…despite the calendar, for my purposes Primavera beat the snot out of Inverno† a few days ago. There will still be a tug o’ war between the two for a few more weeks, but it’s all in the bag but for a few yanks of the rope.
Excuse the meetingspeak, but the takeaway is this: Things are exploding, and explosion is a riotous one. We will miss it if we blink…please do not blink. It is a wonderful few weeks, and a reminder that no matter how bleak things may seem in the Winter, Life always takes the pennant. It may go to seven games, but Life always wins.
Respectfully submitted,
Canoelover
*The PIE root was a total surprise to me. Everything else is fairly straightforward.
† Inverno is Italian for Winter. It is suspiciously close to Inferno (Italian for Hell), but actually comes from Latin hibernum. Hibernate on that for a while.