Issue link: https://newsleader.uberflip.com/i/118445
Sarasota News Leader March 29, 2013 Page 77 On this trip it was red maples. Ranging from All along the route robins also on their way crimson to burgundy, like torches they lit the north took a time out much like their human way. counterparts. I was bringing spring along with me. Yellow jessamine in long streamers from the tops of trees added a colorful accent against In North Carolina, there were fewer maples blue sky crisscrossed with contrails. I could in bloom, but I was compensated by beautiful almost track the airports I was passing. trees laid bare by winter with balls of mistletoe nesting in their branches. Dogwoods clingAt rest stops there was a lot to see and hear: ing to last year's leaves floated in the woods, a red mist of maples just beginning to bloom a foil to the pines. in a swamp; tiny wildflowers in the grasses; red-winged blackbirds; the plaintive call of In a thrift shop in Chapel Hill, I picked up a a meadowlark. A chorus of spring peepers book by the naturalist John Burroughs, who greeted me from a swamp in South Carolina. wrote in the 1800s: "He who marvels at the