Spring Springs Ahead on Beech Street

Callery pear trees in bloom looking east along Beech Street.

I've always been partial to that saying: "Spring ahead, Fall behind," and not just because it helps remind me what to do with my clocks.

As a reader who equally loves science fiction and history, I have always been torn between looking forward and looking back.

With not immutable rules of reality to constrain it, a broader variety of issues can be explored in science fiction because no one throws down the book in frustration and says "that could never happen!" 

Hey, it's science fiction, anything can happen.

But as I get older, and read more history, I find myself leaning more toward the known facts of the past, then the tantalizing but intangible "what if's" of the future.

Sadly, the more and deeper into history I read, the more I realize how much of it we are doomed to keep repeating. Besides, whatever happened to the flying car and personalized jet pack I was promised as a kid?

All of which is a long-winded introduction to saying I'm someone who usually likes Autumn more than Spring.

But if you'll pardon me the pun, one of the things I look forward to happening every spring is driving down Beech Street.

Because at some point in the season (ever-earlier if today's science is to be believed) the callery pear trees which line this sometimes forlorn street explode with starbursts of white color.

This winter will go down as the warmest on record so welcoming spring seem a bit redundant, but the fact is this sight never fails to make me smile.

As I pulled on to Beech Street, one of my favorite passages of Holst's "The Planets" was playing in the CD player and I resolved, as I rushed to my appointment, that it being the first day of spring and all, I would re-create the experience with my handy video camera for, well, someone.

The video is posted on The Mercury web site, but I know it will attract few eyeballs, amid the clamor of burning cars, burning houses and videos of accused recalcitrants of Montgomery County.

So I've also posted it here.

Recognizing that even the advanced sensibilities of Digital Notebook readers have their limits, I realized that too much video of me driving down the road might prove tiresome, so I overlaid some spring-themed photos as well as information about the Pottstown Garden Club's floral photo contest.

(Click here for a link to more information about that.)

So here it is, enjoy it for what it is, a welcome to spring that "an autumn" like me rarely gives.