It's Spring

Spring is officially here, no matter what the calendar says.

This is the Bradford pear tree in our front yard in full bloom. It’s one of the things that I love about our house. We’ve lived here for almost 7 ½ years and I learned something new this year – when the tree first starts to bloom, it smells like a rotting corpse. I actually called the hubby and told him that something had died in our front yard and he needed to locate it and dispose of it pronto. He never could find the dead creature. The next day I was at work and walked by the Bradford pears in front of our building and smelled the same odor. Then a coworker commented about the Bradford pears around her back patio and how badly they smelled this year and I finally realized it was the blooms I was smelling, and not a dead animal in the front yard. The funny thing is I don’t remember them smelling this awful before. And now about a week after they started blooming, the smell is almost gone. Weird.

With the tree blooming and flowers blowing down onto the driveway, the boy has been picking a pretty one every day just for me. And he is so excited that he is able to do this. The first day he saw them strewn about, he grabbed a pretty one off the ground and said excitedly, “Look mom! Aren’t they pretty? I’m going to put this in your room so you’ll have sweet, sweet dreams.” (Now, if you read that last sentence and didn’t think, “Awwwww,” then you don’t have a heart.) And sure enough, when I was getting ready to go to bed that night, there it was on the nightstand on my side of the bed.

I overlooked the fact that the bloom smelled horrible because the gesture was so sweet. And one bloom doesn’t really stink up the room anyway. That sweet boy of mine, he’s a keeper!