Friday Extras: Blink and you'll miss it

It's the first day of Spring, and it's the time of year when, in Texas, the trees burst into bloom.

Blink and you'll miss it; go out of town for spring break and the buds may have all turned green before you've had a chance to take them in. 

I can see them from my apartment balcony. On a grey day like this morning, you could almost believe it had snowed again.

I was especially proud of these little guys, because this year they had already begun to bloom when -- bam -- they were hit by ice and snow. I worried that they wouldn't recover and we'd have a spring with no blossoming trees.

But as soon as the ice and snow melted and the sun came back out, so did the beautiful white flowers.

Soon, though, in a day or two at most, they'll all be bright green. There's only a tiny window to enjoy the tree blossoms. Some of them have already turned.

It makes me think of this Housman poem, which I heard so many times as a college music major in its setting as a popular art song for young voice majors:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
BY A. E. HOUSMAN

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Happy Spring and Happy Friday