Driving conditions
It's nice to drive around these days because there are things in bloom and the woods are greening up incredibly fast. The shad trees are in bloom, but the rain of this weekend knocked nearly all the petals off of the trees around my house. The ground is littered with little white petals, as if we had a wedding and the bride and groom walked down the road. When we were growing up my father used to use Latin names for some (many) plants. He really liked shad trees. "Look children, amalachia canendensis." I say that to myself when I see shad in bloom and it makes me smile. Shad are good trees to have--they're pretty in the spring when they bloom, then they have these great berries that the birds really like. Along the lake shore there are shad and cedar waxwings congregate in them, chirping and flitting the way they do as they eat the berreis.

I like knowing the generic names of flowers, and I owe a debt of gratitude to my father for this. It's pretty queer, though, when everyone else knows that it's called columbine and I only know it as aquilegia.

The yellow flowers are marsh marigolds. They grow along the roadside, in wet spots, sometimes right in the water. They're really pretty and are a definite sign of spring. They are really, really bright and sometimes you'll see a huge patch of them.