Ozark Oddments: Spring!

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Spring!

Harbingers of Spring are the usual suspects:

Daffodils and forsythia are blooming,

tender green leaves have appeared on some shrubs, the peony has sent up the preliminary shoots.

Snakes poke their heads out to see if it warm enough to venture out

from the space under porch where they spend the winter…

Bluebirds check out the nestbox…

And yesterday morning when I walked out of the post office, the tornado siren, which is on a nearby telephone pole, fired up and began blaring. It is very loud, as it should be.

Bad storms can happen any time of the year – not long after we moved here there was a tornado in Springfield in December, but we’re heading into prime time for tornadoes. This part of Missouri is not officially in tornado alley, but we are close enough.

We can hear the siren at our house, which is about 1.5 miles away, and it has sent us down to the basement on more than one occasion when it fired off in the midst of a bad storm.

It is not a sound that one particularly wants to hear when the weather is bad, but I am sure glad we have it.

2 comments:

Far Side of Fifty said...: Like the blooms...the ssssnakes not so much! :) We don't have sirens out here in the boonies but our bedroom is on the lower level so that is as low as we can go:); 10:52 PM
Millennium Housewife said...: How beautiful, Spring is the time we see what the earth has been hiding, so magical!; 1:59 PM

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Thoughts to ponder

Most of us go through life so absorbed in the cocoon of ourselves that we rarely stop to consider the other. Of course, we think that we do; indeed, we may pride ourselves on our capacity for empathy; we may be considerate and thoughtful in our dealings with others, but how often do we stand before them. so to speak, and experience what it is to be them?--Domenica Macdonald

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall
Smith

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Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering -- because you can't take it in all at once. --Audrey Hepburn

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I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.--Agatha Christie

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Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got not to forget to laugh.--Katharine Hepburn

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One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

"Two people... told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is. I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities. I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thoughness. Who, today, can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one another"?--Madeline L'Engle, "A Circle of Quiet"