Green scream

Spring is a fleeting thing in Hades. Generally, it has flown by the Victoria Day weekend (which was last weekend), if anyone has actually noticed that it was here in the first place. Garden centres in The Nation's Capital have been known to openly admonish eager and deluded gardeners who attempt to plant their annuals before May 24th.

This year was an excellent illustration of the folly in not waiting; we've been on a roller-coaster of wildly fluctuating temperatures since March, veering from summer-like heat to a sudden killing frost overnight, then back again. What has been truly weird about the season is that I cannot remember, during my last nine springs here, a time when daffodils, tulips, and lilacs have been blooming at the same time. Generally, the daffs show up in late April/early May, give way to the tulips which are gone by the time the lilacs burst forth with heady fragance in late May to early June. It's late May. The lilacs are nearly gone, having climaxed with the last of the tulips two weeks ago.

Even a "normal" Hades spring reminds me of the Sunbane from the relentlessly bleak trilogy of trilogies written by Stephan R. Donaldson. I vaguely remember making it about halfway through the second trilogy, but there's only so much leprosy, blood-letting and self-loathing one can stomach and I'm really not that much of a fantasy fiction fan. However, the passages describing the unnatural Sunbane spring, with trees being forced into leaf in paroxysms of green agony, stayed with me. I'm reminded of them each time spring comes to Ottawa, and the buds suddenly erupt from the long-barren branches, then hemorrhage into full leaf, usually within the space of a few days. Listen...are the maples screaming?