Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

The locust trees are flowering locally, and so I discovered yesterday from the scent that there are a couple of locust trees across the street from our new apartment.

I discovered locust trees as an adult, while we were living in Inwood, and came to like them a lot. They were a popular tree to plant in the northeastern US a few decades ago, but no longer are. Volunteer locust seedlings can be a nuisance, because the young/thin trunk branches have spines, presumably to protect them from being eaten by bison or horses or something. (They're native to North America.)

I'd seen locusts through the windows of moving buses and trolleys in the last few days, but wasn't sure of the identification--there are other kinds of tree that flower in the spring and produce clusters of white flowers.

We are still getting to know our new neighborhood, including finding some of the spring-flowering shrubs and trees.

I am stressed because of [redacted], and feeling creaky, but cattitude and I just went for a walk, and there are lilies of the valley in bloom a couple of blocks from my apartment.

They're in a sloped yard behind a retaining wall, which puts some of the flowers at or near my nose level, so much easier for me to enjoy. Many years, I crouch or even lie down next to lilies of the valley growing on flatter streets, which would have been a bad idea right now.

Clarification, since someone was confused by my description: these are the usual small lilies of the valley. It's the ground they're growing in that was at about my chin height, in a sloped yard next to the sidewalk. It's a hilly neighborhood.

I went for a walk today, and saw a variety of early spring flowers: a witch hazel bush on my way to the store, and on the way back I walked along the sunny side of Beacon Street and saw three or four colors of crocus (depending on whether the light purple and royal purple count as two colors), and one early daffodil.

I took a photo of the daffodil to send cattitude, who'd said that he expected there would be crocuses in bloom here by the time he got back from Niskayuna, but he thought it was took early for daffodils.That was right after sending him a photo of a clump of crocuses, in the hopes that he would find it cheering. There's still some snow on the ground in Niskayuna, but he sent us a photo of a dwarf iris that's growing in one of the sunnier bits of his father's yard.

(The icon photo is crocuses from Inwood Hill Park, at least ten years ago.)

It is a fine sunny afternoon, around 65F/18C, and I just had a nice walk with cattitude, including sitting on a bench in the sunlight for a few minutes.

He had to mail something at the UPS Store, and I decided to see how my hips and knees were doing. We were walking along a bus route, and I was prepared to stop at any of the bus stops and pay $1.70 for the short trip home.

I was feeling fine, and didn't turn back. When we got to Cushing Square, I pointed out that right now, me going into a shop is lower risk than him going into the same shop. (There was nobody in there except the clerk at the counter, who was also masked, and I was only in there for a minute.

Also, we saw crocuses, in more than one yard (all of them small and pale purple).

One of the oddities of the current situation, with so much shut down and us having had to stay home for most of the past month, is that cattitude and I have been eating more salad than usual. I keep thinking lettuce and other salad greens are going to be difficult to get, so asking for some every time we're getting an order of groceries. And so far the supply is holding out, and while we have the greens salad is a very easy thing to have as part of a meal.

Meanwhile, I have a cabinet full of beans, rice, chocolate, broth, flatbread, canned soup, and so on, which we haven't been using that much of (except the chocolate!). Fortunately, part of why these are the things we stocked up on is that they do keep: I can buy rice in February and eat it in April or June. I also have lots of spices, herbs, and seasoning blends, and what is probably a couple of years' supply of vanilla extract, at the rate I go through it.

The maple trees in our neighborhood, including one right in front of the house, are blooming, which pleases me every year. I had forgotten what kind of tree is in front of the house--it's easy to overlook sidewalk trees, or think mostly of how much the root has buckled the sidewalk. We'll have a week or two of that particular shade of green that Norway maples are, and then leaves a slightly more intense and less yellow green, blocking out more of the sky and they grow.

(Having tagged this "phenology" I will note that the neigborhood forsythias are still bright yellow, before the leaves come in, and I still have one crocus in my front yard, but the rhododendrons are starting to bloom, an intense magenta, and there are violets growing in lawns and sidewalk cracks.

I just watched the trash collection truck come by, and was reassured to see the robot arms pick up the recycling bin, dump the contents into the side of the truck, and lower it to the ground, before proceeding down the street.

I don't think there's likely to be coronavirus on the handles of anyone's bins, but even a small chance would add up over a week's worth of collections.

I also see another crocus sprouting in the lawn, which is cheering.

I planted some crocuses last fall, very haphazardly, and two of them are now in bloom, with the possibility of a few more.

That's a week or two behind some of our neighbors' gardens; they have better soil, or are luckier or more skillful. But even two little golden crocuses please me. The landlord pays a landscaper to mow the lawn, such as it is, and clean the gutters, so any bits I do are extra, and anything serious would mean getting his permission.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood there are daffodils, forsythia, and periwinkles. If I had to choose, the forsythia is my favorite, but fortunately we can have all of these, and many others beside.

cattitudeand I went over to Alewife to do some birding today. This was the first time I'd been there since I had cataract surgery, and I am so glad to be able to see well enough that birding (and looking for frogs and such) is fun again, rather than frustrating.

We started just outside the Russell Field exit of the T station, with a Great blue heron nest Cattitude had seen about ten days ago. He brought a camera today mostly in the hope of photos of nestling herons; someone came past while he was pointing his camera at it, and asked if we knew what kind of birds those were. She then said she'd been walking past and trying to figure it out; I remarked that I thought this was the first time we'd been asked that since we left Inwood, when it happened fairly often (because people had gotten used to seeing us bird-watching). I only spotted two birds; Cattitude, looking through the camera's good birding lens, saw three, so at least one young heron.

Then we walked around Alewife Reservation, slowly and carefully; slowly because of recent hip and knee pain, but we would have stopped frequently in any case, to look at, or for, things. We saw a good variety of birds, including red-winged blackbirds, a flicker, grackles, Canada geese (two adults plus goslings), I think a song sparrow, and of course a few mallards. One of the red-winged blackbirds landed on a railing, near where two people were sitting; hopped toward them and looked meaningfully at something they were eating; and then flew under the bench to pick up crumbs. I am used to mallards, geese, and gulls being that tame, but hadn't seen red-winged blackbirds do that, though I know they can be bold, having once gotten closer to a nest than the birds liked.

We also saw several turtles, a few frogs (I mostly took Cattitude's word that those dark lumps in the water were frogs, rather than rocks or carvings of trilobites), and flowers. Lilac season isn't quite over, and I think I smelled lily of the valley while we were walking through Alewife reservation, as well as the fine patch we stopped to sniff while walking along Highland Avenue to the bus stop.

I think I found a good balance between having fun, and turning back when I needed to; both my hips and then my left knee were sore by the time we got down to the train platform, but resting quietly at home helped a lot. I have since done a few of my PT exercises, and didn't feel the need for acetominophen to supplement the naproxen (NSAID) I took before we headed out.

I saw and, more importantly, smelled my first lilac of the spring this afternoon, a white lilac with many open blossoms. I thought at first that it was going to be a washout, literally—there was noticeable rain falling—and then walked a little further down the sidewalk, which put me downwind of the lilac. There are lilac bushes closer to my apartment, but they're waiting for more sunny days, or something.

Also on that walk I saw white violets, rhododendrons, forsythia, periwinkle, tulips, daffodils, and dandelions. (And two just-planted rosebushes, fully in bloom, which was disconcerting.) There are a lot of purple violets blooming near me, and some maple trees that haven't dropped all their flowers yet.

Weather permitting, I hope to go to the Arnold Arboretum on Tuesday and enjoy their lilacs.

I feel like I got a lot done today, some of it stuff I'd been putting off.

I went to a rally this afternoon, in favor of a $15 minimum wage and paid family medical leave. Those are separate proposals, but being backed by many of the same people and organizations, both of which may be on the Massachusetts ballot in November.

The rally was in the Massachusetts State House. Yes, inside. (I don't know what permits are needed to hold a rally, with microphones, there.) There are at least two disadvantages to that location: it got uncomfortably noisy (even with earplugs), and I had to wait in line to go through a metal detector. Also, it will definitely be noticed by the state legislators, but not people just passing by—and a rally across the street on Boston Common will get passers-by. I assume that the organizers think it's worth it to be sure the state legislature will notice them. (Some of the emails etc. I got about this event talked about "lobbying" as well as a rally, so maybe they figured that the core group would have to be in the building anyway,)

I didn't stay as long as I'd intended to, because the noise was getting to me; I was feeling slightly unsteady on my feet; and the first speaker seemed to be talking more about religion than about the issues. (To be fair, if I'd listened longer he might have said more about what we were rallying for and less about his belief that working for this was not just a good but a godly thing.)

So I went back outside and sat on a bench, and then on the grass on the Common, before getting a late lunch from a food truck. To my pleasant surprise, "Bon Me" did have something I wanted (rather than all being too spicy): Chinese barbecue pork, which I had over brown rice, with lettuce and pickled daikon and radish. Somehow, at that moment, this was comfort food. While I was eating, I saw other people who'd been at the rally (based on stickers and SEIU local 1199 t-shirts), which made me feel better about not staying longer.

On my way home, I went to the main Boston and Somerville libraries to pick up books I had on hold. There are half a dozen apple trees in bloom in front of the main Somerville library right now. (The whole area is full of flowering cherries this week; I haven't seen many apple trees.)

This morning, before heading out, I called the physical therapy place where I went for my hips and made an appointment for a first session of PT for my left knee, which I'd been putting off in the hope that maybe I didn't actually need it. I told the receptionist I didn't care whether I saw the same therapist again: continuity of care seems less relevant now that it's a separate course of treatment, and the person I was seeing for my knee had done a few things that annoyed me.

[Edited to fix a copy/paste error that ate about a line of text.]