Suddenly spring

.
Suddenly spring overwhelms the senses with a conviction that winter is past.

Even the flurry of sycamore trees floating feathery seeds down on mounds of blooming snowdrops seems a distant memory.  

The seeds have all fallen.  And those snowy white flowers have been wholly succeeded by brilliant suns of lesser celandine lighting the streamside from their blanketing habit of green.
.

.
Now the ground is drizzled with darkened drops of a red maple’s fallen flowers.

The crabapple tree shows its first young leaves.

And the twisted boxelder once again suspends its tasseling flowers over the rocky stream.
.

.
Up on the banks, by the quickly filling, but not yet blooming, tangle of multiflora rose, where the recently woken woodchuck feeds each morning, modest hedgemaids, long awaited and soon gone, inch up to the world their hidden floral adornments.

Washing over it all in a moment is the sound of what seem to be splashing creek chubs.  

Racing into the shallow riffles, wriggling out of water upon the dry sides of rocks, and scattering banded schools of smaller minnows,  they make hasty wakes up and down the way.
.

.
A sympathetic viewer is easily smitten … overwhelmed, even … by so much to witness at the start of a third spring sharing some Little Crum Creek.

Then an erratically fluttering cabbage white  instantly lifts the vision and scatters it across the slim, crowding woodland with a renewed promise of still more to come.
.

.

.