We're rolling into one of my favorite mini-seasons of the year. As bad a mood as I've been in lately, it couldn't come any sooner. If I had any friends left, they'd agree.
I love when the colors appear at the end of winter and this year the colors appeared earlier than normal. Sarvis and redbud, yellow easter tulips are a welcome relief from the cold and grey. But the next phase is what really gets my attention.
You know it's coming when the redbud blooms begin to fade and drop. The brown hillsides break out in orange splotches that blend into lime and pea colors around the no longer bare trees. You can see buds fall and leaves popping on the trees now. All along the ridges, a faint green glow is overtaking the dull brown of last year's dead remains. And the watery eyes of allergy sufferers from Pikeville to Pound tell us one thing: The green explosion is coming and it's coming soon.
I call it the greening. That two weeks when every plant and leaf that has stayed hidden and dormant since last October wake up and turn our world from brown and gray to a thousand shades of emerald.
Soon the bleak hillsides with scars and cliffs exposed will be covered in fern green and forest green, laurel green and myrtle green, moss green and pine green, and shades of green that appear in nature that you too can look up on Wikipedia.
I love the greening. It fills me with awe each and every year. It's a million trees waking up and taking a great big breath. Then throwing a great big blanket over everything, softening the hard angles. It just doesn't happen everywhere. It hardly happens most places at all, definitely not so quickly and completely as here.
It is another thing that is unique to this region, this geography. Some hardly seem to notice, but most of you get it. I think our immersion in this geography causes us...me anyway, you can come along...to internalize and embrace the transformation. A little rebirth.
That's what spring is, right? A new beginning? A clean slate? That's what I'm feeling the need of right now. You know when everyone annoys you, the problem ain't them.
The green explosion always puts a lyric in my ears, like the hillsides are singing. They're words from an old regular baptist hymn called Two Coats.
I'll tell you the best thing I ever did do, pull off the old coat and put on the new.
I'm pretty sure that's what the big ridge that runs from Elkhorn to Jellico is singing anyway. If you listen over the next couple of weeks, maybe you'll hear it. It's the coat of many shades. Of green.
And green is good.