Looking out my Backdoor: Spring, Sprang, soon to be Sprung

Please don’t grimace like that, Mrs. Hunter. I’m drunk on spring love and language is ours to play games.

Spring arrives quickly here in Jalisco, the Garden State of Mexico. I declare, we are definitely in the Sprang stage of Spring. Boing. Boing. Boing. What fun it is.

Light opens the sky a little bit earlier. Not much, here closer to the Equator, but a little. And it stays around a little bit longer in the evening before it drops behind the mountains. And the day warms up sooner, stays warm longer. Ah, Spring.

Yesterday while talking with my neighbor Janet, we saw a Crimson Collared Tanager. I looked it up in my handy bird book. We have a vast variety of tanagers and this type is a new-comer in the neighborhood.

Three days ago I saw a butterfly I’d not seen before. It was the deepest, brightest, most pure yellow, large, not as large as a bed-sheet butterfly, but larger than the more common yellow butterflies that are always with us.

This morning I came nose to nose with a dragonfly on my clothesline. She had the sweetest face, like a miniature ET. We stared at each other for an actual two minutes, nose to nose, and she showered me with love. Allow me my notions, illusions, delusions, please. Spring is Sprang. Love is Sprung in the air.

For the last two weeks I’ve been eating zucchini and/or squash blossoms every day from my own garden buckets. By the weekend, I’ll be eating my own tomatoes. Tomatillos, kissing cousins to tomatoes, already are hanging lovely green Japanese lanterns on every vine. The larger ones are filling out nicely.

I miss my lettuce salads but I had such a good crop, fed me and my neighbors for months, so I let it go to seed. In a week or thereabout, I’ll be able to replant the baby bathtubs, the containers I use for lettuce beds. Lettuce does not require depth.

Janet’s Jacaranda tree, always the first of this tree to show color, is bursting with purple blooms. Mine is still shedding leaves like rain. The trees seem to have jumped the season by a month. But I assume they know their schedule better than I do. Lani’s tree will turn purple next. Then mine. John’s tree is last. The strange things I notice.

Seasons seem so different here, to me. Spring springs sudden out of winter, admittedly a mild season, morphs very quickly into Summer, which I’ll call mid-March to mid-June. The next season is the Rainy, through into October. October and November are autumn. Then December and January round out winter.

Birds are building new nests or repairing winter damage on the old homestead. They have absolutely no morals, billing and cooing shamelessly, especially the partridge doves who act like love birds year-round but go nuts in spring.

I have to be careful when picking zucchini, gathering, pruning or tending flowers of any kind, including tomato blossoms. Bees. Oh, the bees. They are, oh, well, busy as … bees. They live their own cliché. Gathering honey. Carrying pollen. Making sure life goes onward, sweetly.

I just returned from my evening walk with Lola. This week a huge bull has moved into the field with the horses, a temporary pasture he uses during Mardi Gras. This animal is huge with great horns and giant lop ears. I know it is Spring. The bull was leaning over the fence, licking the small horse’s face with his great larruping tongue.

The horse would move her head forward for a lick, then back. Then forward, then back. A dance. Love is strange.

Me, I’m having a heart attack, falling in love all over again, with everything I see.

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Sondra Ashton grew up in Harlem but spent most of her adult life out of state. She returned to see the Hi-Line with a perspective of delight. After several years back in Harlem, Ashton is seeking new experiences in Etzatlan, Mexico. Once a Montanan, always. Read Ashton’s essays and other work at http://montanatumbleweed.blogspot.com/. Email sondrajean.ashton@yahoo.com.