One of the reasons I love living where I do is that Spring seems to come with more omens than it does in cities. (Who knows? Maybe it’s just that when I used to live in them, I wasn’t playing as close attention.) In any case, today I saw another sign.

I always look forward to the moss starting to green up, and the bulbs blooming, each in turn. I’ve already seen the first toad. New bamboo shoots won’t start coming up for several weeks, and the first turtles likely won’t appear until May or June. But today, while clearing wood from the swale, I noticed this little guy leaping around:

And about a half an hour later, distant enough so that we knew it wasn’t just the same creature, Irene spotted this guy:

This is how I like to see animals, not in cages, or under glass, or in zoos, but out in their own world doing their own thing.

I imagine that the first snake isn’t far behind … but we’ll try not to think about that too much for now.