Monday: encounters with beauty

This category is such a gimme—in Portland—in spring!

Scott and I take a walk every day after lunch—longer and longer, as the weather improves. And I often take an earlier walk with Huck or Rilla or both. Some days, after Scott and I return, I go back out, another ramble through the streets of Northeast PDX, by myself. With music or with silence. I love walking to a soundtrack, but a quiet walk provides the white space I’ve been seeking. I sometimes find it hard to choose.

In bloom this week: daffodils (the earliest risers now fading, but big lush clumps of them still nodding in full glory); cherry blossoms and tulip magnolias; a few flowers left on the flowering plums & Bartlett pears, but those are mostly leafing out; tulips beginning to open; a profusion of grape hyacinths (my favorite bulbs); wild violets in the lawns; camellias already dropping petals in a thick carpet on the sidewalk and grass; vinca and lantana; a few early rhododendrons.

Bees ecstatic in the cherry blossoms.

Last year’s green onions, neglected, fattening with bloom.

Poems by Thomas A. Clark, who continues to delight me.

to feel while the wind
  howls over stones
or tears at the meadow grasses
  quiet in your bones

The captivating videos of Abe Haruya, porcelain artist

Oh and so much spring