Welcome Spring Part II: Happy May Day! (Summer?)

Soon after I published my last post, I found myself wishing I’d waited. I found even more great wildflower hikes in the Eugene/Springfield area!

That next week, my coworkers and I took our 11th & 12th grade students to Mt. Pisgah. Not the Arboretum side or even Swing Hill, but we hiked over 6 miles up to the summit and down from the other side (East/Pleasant Hill trailhead; I’d never done that side) and then another couple miles out and back to the river. Some of the students had never really hiked, but they made it! And both hikes were covered in camas lilies, wild irises, and a small pink flower I didn’t recognize. (Oh, and poison oak). At the end of the week, I hiked a bit in the upper trails of the Arboretum there and saw more camas and irises. Then my friend Jas and I hiked the South Eugene Meadows trail of the Ridgeline trail system after donating blood since it’s one of the easier hikes in the area, and we weren’t supposed to do strenuous stuff after donating. I had to go back to South Eugene later that day, so I walked the camas-filled path at Wayne Morse park for the first time in a good while (I used to live near it). And another day, I stopped at Willamette Heights again, and saw some full-on tall irises along the trail! Spring is beautiful!

Or should I call it summer? I looked up May Day to explain it to my students on Friday, and remembered that in older times in Europe, it was considered to be the beginning of summer. That’s why the tradition of “Midsummer” is at the summer solstice, which is usually when we kick off summer here. Tomorrow is supposed to be 84 degrees here in the Willamette Valley, so summer makes sense! But I don’t count summer until I wrap up the last term’s grades and go on vacation. I’m excited to have one this year! It’s been 6 years since I’ve had a full teacher summer off, since I worked in the insurance industry the last few years and taught at a school that had summer school for the 3 years before that.

Anyway, I wanted to post some more wildflower photos from the last couple weeks because they are gorgeous. And one non-wildflower pic: our cat Arwen enjoying her new Hobbit-themed kitty door that my husband installed last weekend. I showed that photo to my students and two classes requested a “Take your pet to work day” so they could meet her. They might like that, but she wouldn’t! She survived visiting my students on Zoom during the pandemic, and that’s enough for her.

Happy spring, again! Or summer!