traveling on a cloud...

I am traveling again,but not another one of my famous 'stay and see georgia' trips - this one took me up in the clouds and across the landscape at an amazing speed.I never fail to wonder how something that massive and weighty can get off the ground - much less travel such distances before coming safely back to the earth. I am in Virginia visiting family, people I am crazy about and seldom see.

So interesting to travel as the seasons are changing and see the difference several hundred miles can make. Things that have faded after spring showiness in middle Georgia are beautify-full here. Redbud trees and dogwoods fill the woods, with lots of deciduous trees just beginning to leaf out, so you see plenty of the ones that are gloriously blooming. Massive bushes of brilliant forsythia covered with tiny yellow bursts of color, looking like the clouds of yellow sulphur butterflies that congregate in puddles on dirt roads in south Georgia. Breathtaking tulips - planted en mass in quantities that make your mouth water.Clumps of wee light blue blooms of wildflowers along the right of way shouting out with their teeny little smiling faces, saying: Spring, spring, spring! Birds chattering furiously in the trees - looking for spouses, ready to search for nesting material and raise a family...

And the clouds of pollen wafting through the air, actually visible, blowing across the landscape, making the world oddly colored through the haze, and the need for a good drenching rain a major topic of conversation.

I remember a summer many years ago, when we were in a severe drought from early in the year, and we never really actually had spring, so many things died or did not bloom due to lack of rainfall. By the end of May much of the green of grasses had turned to dehydrated tans and fried looking khaki-brown. I found myself traveling to visit a friend in upper New York State - and amazed to see such green-ness. Their winter had obviously been wet, and everything there, almost to Canada, was gloriously surprisingly green. Such a dramatic change from the desperately panting south Georgia I'd left when I flew north - and somehow so much easier to breathe the air that was mysteriously refreshing as a result of massive quantities of chlorophyll.

This  spring has been much wetter than those of recent years. I heard mention on public radio that one of the north Georgia lakes, part of the Corps of Engineers resevior system is at full pool. They have been serciously, or maybe critically low for years, and to have them full to the point that all the floating docks are floating again, instead of languishing on the clay banks is unusual. As I have traveled to TN and SC and passed over several of the huge man-made lakes used for both recreation and a water source in north GA, I have been alarmed at how low they've been. But perhaps this winter and spring of generous rains will turn things around, though the experts say the drought danger is not fully over.