Notes from my Knapsack 4-15-21

Notes from my Knapsack 4-15-21

Jeff Gill

Moonlight on daffodils

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Daffodils are much in evidence around Granville, and here on the southern edge of the Welsh Hills of Licking County, it's only right that we identify so strongly with the spring flower, a symbol of Wales itself.

Across the pond, they're a big part of St. David's Day, which comes March 1, the national festival of Wales, but around here the daffodils tend to open up later than that. And to me, as the yellow or white blossoms start to wither and fade, that's when it feels as if spring is ending.

My dogwood hasn't opened up yet, and I'd say the dropping of the flowers from that tree that really signals the start of the summer season in my mind. In deeper forest, the tulip poplar, or yellow poplar, has glorious blossoms that we only tend to see past peak and after they fall, and so later in May and into June: yellow-green petals and bands of a soft orange, showing their best only to those occupants and passers-by of the forest canopy, squirrels and butterflies and warblers on their way through.

And I love the Latin name for tulip trees: Liriodendron tulipifera. You can say it as a magic spell to summon the wonders of the blossoming world, as they finish their term above and flutter down to cast their beauty onto woodland trails. Liriodendron tulipifera . . .

For now, we still have full beds of daffodils, and some evenings as I head up to bed, I'll look out across the front porch to the mounded clumps of blossom, and see the luminous white of those deeply yellow trumpets under the moonlight above. It's a very particular white that I associate with this time of year, daffodils and night time and the weeks after Easter when the sun is in a hurry to rise earlier and earlier each day, and in general so am I.

Now that I can go to bed with windows open, I believe I sleep better, and find it easier to get up sooner, and coffee may taste better to me in the spring than it does any other time of year, and trust me I've been running a long-term, year-round experiment on this vital question.

Earlier in the spring, it was warm enough of an evening to try sitting out on my patio for the first time in what seemed like a year — last summer I was much on the road and too little at home — and saw my first insects of 2021, small black ovals so inoffensive and unstingery as to be welcome companions. We're told in national media that a major cicada brood will be out this year, which usually means "around DC and New York City" but in fact Brood X is probably the largest seventeen year cycle group of cicadas, and they have an interesting and complicated range, which includes western Ohio.

In Licking County, we're mostly in Brood V territory (entomologists use Roman numerals for the various brood cycles, which gives Brood X a wonderfully ominous name for no particular reason), but it's also well known that cicadas can't read maps, so it wouldn't be odd for a few batches of Brood X to show up especially in the western half of the county.

As we wait for the cicadas to start their drone, I'll just sit here and whisper: Liriodendron tulipifera.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready to be outside more this summer. Tell him what you love about nature at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.