A Two-fer-one Day

Spring is indeed lingering in Texas. Today was beautiful, a swirling mix of warm with sunshine and cool with shaded, cloud-dappled skies. As one flower droops, another bursts into floresence. Everything is long and tall and weedy these days. Today I noticed the weedy lands were covered in Rose Gentian blooms, hiding below the bobbing seed heads on foxtail grasses and fading firewheels. I saw a Questionmark Butterfly manically skidding around the Agarita in the last sun patches of the day, as I pulled in tonight after work. It lured me out for a walk, even in my knee-length, sleeveless dress. This time I had the presence of mind, at least , to spray a little DEET-y spray on my legs before my wander. I am sick of so many itchy bumps, especially since the last time I went berry-picking I ended up with the large, puffy, insanely itchy red welts that herald the long-suffering of the chigger bite.
I watched the clouds form boiling pink and orange towers, the dark threat of rain in the opposite corner of the sky from the sinking sun. I couldn't help but take a quick step in every newly discovered ant heap I found, staring at the resulting chaos I just can't seem to resist creating for every colony I come across. I need to get out into the yard with the Amdro again, during a rain-free spell, whenever that comes, to put the ants down once again. They are the only critter I enjoy getting rid of, because they might eat you if you fall down into one of their mounds.
I found a plump, fuzzy, black caterpillar clinging to a bobbing blade of tall grass. I'm always pretty proud of myself when I find a caterpillar. I love the whole transformative life cycle of those squishy little bags of bug guts. I particularly enjoy identifying butterflies, by watching their unique flight patterns and flashes of colors, scanning with my eyes and quickly changing my range of focus to follow a specimen long enough to get a lock on the genus, if not the species. I am not very good at finding caterpillars or crystalises, however. So, woohoo! Score one for me.
There is a light green, stalky, soft, leafy plant that is taking over the yard. I do not know what it is, and I would like to. It seems really useless and is crowding out the more interesting stuff right now. I would like to know what it is, because I would like to love it more, since there is a lot of it. I also spotted lots of slender, glittery-eyed spiders with furry, light-colored limbs and tiny, weed-colored, almost perfectly camoflauged grasshoppers. They always seem like paranoid little weirdos to me, with their ridged carapace and their large eyes that extend into the back of their head segment. They make a lot of noise.
The ground is dry and hard, except for a few regular marshy spots on the back acre, even though we've a had a few nights with pretty good rain showers lately. Ruts, carved when the ground was more like frosting, have remained however, now crusty and likely to trip a wanderer like myself. But ending up with my hands in the dirt and my face down near that strip of grass that grows down the middle of all country lanes, I was reminded of one of my favorite flowers, the wild honeysuckle, still blooming like crazy, like it has for months, nestled among the long weedy grasses. The wild honeysuckle always tickles my fancy because it is so delicate, but blooms so steadily on that punished strip of grass I'm talking about. It amazes me that it continues to bloom here, because I know my exhaust system cuts right over it, and the bumper of our friend's truck slices right into its space, too. Wild Honeysuckle might be small, but I could smell it, pitched over onto two hands and only one foot, head down, and only one delicate, tiny, half-inch bloom inches from my face. I could smell it like it was a hedge of star jasmine, not just clusters of white and pink eyelash-like petals arrayed on a slender stem. I picked it, and carried it around with me, smelling it constantly. They wither quickly, and it is all stem and curled up petals by now, like a miniscule columbine flower. I admire these little beauties, for being so perfect and delicate and strong blooming in the dangerzone, the middle of the road, where even grass only dares to grow so high. I took a deep breath and noticed it was getting duskier by the moment.
When I returned to the house to putter inside, the Indigo Girls were on the radio, singing "...when God made me born a Yankee he was teasing" ... a song about springtime in the southlands. Amen, sisters.