The purple season

This is the marvelous time of year in Maine when purple flowers amass.

In friendly competition for kingly glory are the lilac and the lupine, untended and free. The lilac bush stands 10 or 15 feet high and often matches that in width. You can't get the sight of them out of your eyes, nor the smell from your nose. The other day I smelled lilac even on Beech Hill, hundreds of feet in the air, no bush for a mile that I could see.

Lupine effortlessly carpets fields along the highway, in front of a house. They propagate underground, and the one we planted last year in the oceanside garden has quadrupled in size and will take over from iris and phlox and lily if we let it. Like the lilac, it presents sometimes in white. Unlike the lilac, it stoops to red and pink.

Such royal vigor in a difficult climate!

A little tamer, that is, more cultivated, the rhododendron in these parts stays closer to house than roams in the wild. Warmer places like New Hampshire and Massachusetts and Ohio show them off en masse. And here the purple is rarer, the flowers tending to pink and white.

Very tame indeed are the irises just now bursting from those tight buds. Gorgeous, of course, but dependent on human hands to weed and feed.

Then there are the vestiges of purple infusing the beach rose, wild geranium, clover.

I feel like a prince among leaves.

The old gray chair

she ain't what she used to be. She's in the twilight of her life, set aside from the new Adirondacks, pushed under the fir. Dragged from Massachusetts, a cast-off from suburbia, she's rested here for nearly 20 years. A few years ago, she lost her mate from terminal joint disease; he's now been chopped up for firewood. She creaks a bit. A surgeon replaced key wooden ligaments with metal bolts; she's no longer all natural. One doesn't know if household liability insurance covers a collapsing accident.

She's very heavy, made from oak, so heavy that this past winter her cruel and aging owner left her outside, unlike the lightweights nearby, light and constructed from some tropical wood from Southeast Asia, supposedly sustainable, that he lovingly shelters and oils each year. Even so, will they boast her longevity, or become decrepit in the Maine storms, and sustain nothing?

Please sit with me one more time.

Spring trash day

Picked up along Ash Point Drive on my walk this morning:

• a couple of beer cans and one bottle
• many styrofoam coffee cups
• several paper coffee cups
• a length of foam wrapping
• a sock
• juice bottles (2)
• soda can, only one this year
• paper towels, wadded
• broken mason jar
• 2 plastic flowers blown from the cemetery
• disposable diapers, 2, in the raspberry patch, neatly tied, full

All carried home in a plastic shopping bag from Walmart, whence some of this stuff undoubtedly came.

On the deck, with snow

Back in Maine for the first time in a month. Almost the first thing to do was put out the deck chairs, because, well, it's spring, and 60 degrees and sunny, even though snow needed to be shoveled from said deck, even though there's still a bank of snow surrounding the deck and hiding from the sun, and in the back yard still a lot of banks of snow, including one three-foot pile on the driveway left over from construction by the plow. It's a strange sensation to be sitting on the deck with snow still in the yard, as if a reminder that this winter may never go away. Maine wasn't even missed all that much recently, for one knew this discouraging winter would grip the land up here for a while yet. In Massachusetts, site of snow records, nearly every sign of our discontent is gone, giving way to crocuses and daffodils. Here, the woods and lanes still carry the reminders (although the hostas are bravely peeking out). Never has winter seemed so long (even though it wasn't - what we didn't get in December, we got in March). Those of us who don't usually get depressed, were.  And now: just keep the eyes up for a while, looking at the blue of water and sky, feeling the sun on the face, watching the season's first osprey soar.