The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren't written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.

Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.

Nature seems to look after her own only up to a certain point; beyond that they are supposed to fend for themselves.

To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing - if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.