M U S I N G S

It truly seems that winter has blown the last whistle. Even when I take our dog out for a last run at about midnight, the air is mild and no longer biting. 
At 7 O'clock in the morning, when I get up, the day is full of light and the sky is blue and I can feel the sun, just behind the mountain.

Snowbells abound in our garden. Sure they have been planted some years ago. They do not grow wild as they did in the woods along the river close to the town where I grew up, but, being perennials, they come up every year as soon as bad-man winter has flown the coop.

This reminds me of the time when I was a boy. I lived in a small Austrian town on the border to Germany. The river called Inn was and still is the border between the two countries. Along the river Inn, and up river runs a dense stand of trees. 
Up and up along the river the "Au" stretches for many kilometers and in Spring, in certain places, there were areas between the birch trees and the elms and the willows almost as far as the eye could reach, white on white with Snowbells, interspersed with little blue flowers, called Sky stars, and where the ground was very moist, yellow  "Key Flowers" also grew in profusion. 
I've not been there in a long long while and I wonder if these flowers still grow there in such masses.
We used to pick a bunch of Snowbells, surround them with the blue Skystars and surround those with the yellow  Keyflowers. Then we would wrap some moss, which we peeled from the north side of certain trees, around this bouquet of spring flowers, tie the whole thing three or four times with thin twigs from a willow bush, and another slightly sturdier twig was bent like a U and, upside down, would be fastened to this arrangement. 
We'd dip the moss into water and carry the whole thing home.
There was only a very short time in Spring that you could do that, because the yellow Keyflowers came out at just about the time when the Snowbells and the Sky Stars were on their last legs. To find all three flowers in fresh bloom was tricky. You just had to know where to look. Of course, we knew every square meter of the  "Au". 
When Summer came, and the Inn was no longer freezing cold, we'd leave our shirts and pants hidden near the sand bank and in our underwear we'd run three or four kilometers up river and let the current take us back to where we had started.
It was a great place: The "Au" and the "Inn"

so, fondly remembers
Bertstravels.