The trees are coming into leaf ...

A busy day today, preparing for a Mothers' Union coffee morning in aid of Ukraine at our church's Atrium café on Saturday. There will be a table where people can make Mothering Sunday and Easter cards, and I have provided lots of die cuts, stamped pictures, ribbons and printed spring papers to be used as required.

My husband and I managed to get out for a brief walk late in the afternoon, and I marvelled at how quickly the old horse chestnut trees on the Green have come into leaf. The sticky buds have burst open and the branches are now covered in a lacy green canopy. 

In this poem, Larkin talks about the trees becoming green in May, but I couldn't wait that long to quote him. By then the trees will be fully out and the poem won't be so relevant!

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin