Spring Journal: Color

Color enters the valley like a whispered fire.

At first, it arrives as if dreamed—leaves no larger than a mouse’s ear, painting the bare branches with the faintest hint of life. The forest undergrowth shimmers with this tentative green, so pale it could be morning mist caught in the twigs. The same ghostly fog gathers in the treetops, trembling between presence and absence.

After months of winter’s worn parchment—brown grass, gray bark, beige leaves crumbling to soil—this sudden flush of color feels like a fever dream: too delicate to be real, too fresh to last. Yet each dawn deepens the green tide. Wineberry leaves unfurl like tiny ferns, their edges serrated and sharp. Spicebush stems glow lime-bright. Serviceberry and honeysuckle weave emerald lace against the spring sky. The green burns so fiercely, so electric, that even summer’s deepest shade seems faded and false in comparison.

Wild color ignites and spreads across the valley floor as the woods shift from watercolor to oil painting. Purple snow crocuses pierce the winter-beaten grass like violet flames. The fire spreads—buttercups spill molten gold across the earth, daffodils raise yellow trumpets to the sun, and hyacinths scatter pools of deepest blue along the stream where squirrels have planted and forgotten their bulbs. Then, the Judas trees explode.

Before touching green to their branches, Eastern Redbud Trees burst into shocking pink—not the soft rose of sunrise or the gentle mauve of twilight, but the raw, electric magenta of summer lightning. Blooms erupt directly from the bark, wrapping each trunk and limb in a cloak of impossible brightness. Against the slowly greening woods, they burn like signal fires, like festival lanterns strung through the awakening forest.

What we see as pure white sunshine contains every shade our eyes can comprehend, a hidden spectrum dancing invisibly through the air until it meets the world and shatters into color. The cardinal blazing in the dogwood does not create his brilliant red—he shares it, reflecting one wavelength while absorbing all others to warm his feathers. The Redbud glows in its outrageous pink through this same selective reflection, each petal a tiny mirror giving back only its rowdy light.

Every color emerges from this mysterious exchange—not from what is taken but from what is returned. The valley’s endless palette—purple crocus, golden daffodil, blue hyacinth, flaming Redbud, cool green leaf—exists only in conversation with light. Sunlight, like grace, shines on all things equally, yet each is illuminated only by the part of that unified light it chooses to reflect.