Signs of Spring

 A photo from Mike Willock with a note: “At the entrance to the Memorial Garden at the church. A lovely offering.” I’m sure by the time anyone is at church later in the week or next Sunday, there will be even more “lovely offerings.”

Tim Woodcock writes: Over the weekend, we drove from St. Louis down to northern Arkansas for a short Spring Break trip. In the three-and-half-hour drive, we saw the familiar signs of early spring that you might expect – the pink blossoms of magnolia trees blossoming in Tower Grove Park and whites of Bradford pear trees, lining the many roads, both major and minor, when all the other trees appeared to be still dormant.

Given the long drive and the sheer number of Bradford pears, we noticed an interesting phenomenon – given it’s so early, many trees were actually only half in bloom, prodigiously blooming on their south-facing sides, while still looking quite wintry on their north side. And an even more marked phenomenon in our springtime journey (which was heading directly south for 200 miles): the trees were incrementally more in bloom in southern Missouri than in the central part of the state, and even more in bloom in Arkansas compared to Missouri.

During a lunch stop in a park in Poplar Bluff, Mo. (20 miles north of the Missouri-Arkansas border), I photographed this beauty.