snowdrops

Not exactly snowdrops in this patch, but THINKING about snowdrops (see bottom)

Sunday thinking time ...

Who, me?

Well, as a matter of fact ...

 Doco was in charge of introducing the Unitarian service on Sunday.  Here are his thoughts:

"Let me begin with a few words about snowdrops.  They have been blooming, lovely as ever, for more than a week in the bed beneath the plane tree.  But they are early this year, and I am uneasy.  Early snowdrops.  Almost no snow on the North Shore mountains.  When there as a kid in mid-winter, stovepipes from the cabins below poked up through a dozen feet of snow.  When Europeans first overwintered along the lower Fraser -- at Ft. Langley in 1827 -- the river froze for five weeks.  It could be walked on inland for a hundred miles.  In the Canadian arctic, the active layer that melts each summer above the permafrost has been warming for as long as records have been taken, some thirty years.  The infinitely precious natural world of which we are a part is changing uncomfortably quickly.   The snowdrops, it seems to me, are speaking to us, reminding us by their delicate loveliness of the greatest gift of the past, the natural world as we have known it, and of its fragility."

(actually, Wiltshire Street snowdrops)