Covid spring No. 2

Hunkered down in B.C.’s third wave of Covid, waiting for a slow-as-molasses vaccine rollout, and reduced to reading mystery novels (yay, Agatha Christie and PD James!) for escape, it would be easy to be gloomy these days. And truthfully, yes, mostly, we are. But Covid can’t stop the birds from bouncing in the bird bath, the cherries and magnolias from blooming pink and white, or the athletes among us from doing what they must. Here are some photos of what’s keeping our spirits up as we enter our second Covid spring.

Okay, so we disobeyed, just a tiny bit, the order to stay home, and drove the Sea-to-Sky Highway up to Squamish on Tuesday. On the beach we saw a new kind of sport, which we'll call freewinging. People in wetsuits climb onto surfboards and hold a plastic inflatable wing into the wind, then zoom along above the water.  Yes, if you look closely, you can see they are actually a foot or two above the water. What a magic way to celebrate spring! Photo by John Denniston.

By comparison, this is old hat, but there were still plenty of windsurfers out too. Photo by John Denniston.

Sticking with the athletic theme, here is John on a soccer field at Jericho earlier Tuesday. If the grass had been real instead of artificial, he said, he could have imagined he was 15 years old and practising his soccer moves the first time around.  

Out the front door: From the top of our front steps, we look into a star magnolia on the left and standard magnolia on the right, just about to burst into white blossoms. Photo by John Denniston. 

Walk down the steps and to the left is my favourite combination of spring colours -- a patch of blue hyacinths in front with white hellebores behind. Photo by John Denniston.

The following photos are from my ramblings around the city in the last few days. Every spring blog has to have an avenue of cherry trees, and here is this year's.

I liked the look of the delicate blossoms against the rough dark trunk.

One street had a series of trees underplanted with a circle of crocuses, each featuring different colours. Here was the purple and white one. . . .

... followed by the yellow, mauve and white.

A cheery row of coral-red quince blossoms. 

This bush of white azaleas is an early bloomer.

Hellebores seem to be quite the thing these days. This front garden was full of them, in all the different colours.

This hedge was underplanted with them in alternating colours. 

Nothing quite beats a simple stand of daffodils at the foot of an old tree. 

This tulip magnolia caught my eye on my Tuesday-morning walk to Jericho.

Along Jericho beach,  berries linger from the winter.

Back home again, some winter pansies have come to life in a back-yard planter. They're fighting it out with ivy and ferns. 

In the dining-room window, there's a bouquet of daffodils I rescued from the garden after they were flattened by wind and heavy rain. They smell like spring.