Most of you would disagree with me if I said spring is drab, especially those of you in the Pacific Northwest where spring came early and marches rapidly forward with an unprecedented succession of blooms.

But spring is drab.

At least some places.

And one of them is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I spent Easter week. It was not your typical spring break vacation, no palms, no sunny sands. There were a few balmy days near 60, though, melting most of the snow.

Even though the calendar said it was spring, we were days past the equinox, even though there a few robins hopped through the brown fields and the sand hill cranes landed with a gusto of trumpeting behind my mother’s house, it did not look at all like what we might call spring.

But it was spring!

When I was growing up in the Great Lakes region this was one of my favorite times of year. I loved looking for signs of spring, the first sprig of grass, the green nubs of bulbs poking through. I have not been back home in the early spring in many decades. This was a treat for me.

So I headed out to the sugar maple woods to see if anything was coming up.

One of the earliest to emerge is Claytonia virginica, spring beauty.

Allium tricoccum, ramps or wild leek, were also pushing through.

Even my mother’s lupines that have naturalized along the road in the tall grass began to grow in the few warm days after snow melt.

Certainly this is not the big show that is being posted all over the web these days. But it is also spring: determined shoots responding to the first warmth.

And this is also beautiful to those who look.

No tulip, daffodil or lilac is as beautiful to me as that first growth after winter. I’m glad I had a chance to go back and experience it again.

But I was equally glad to move south to Milwaukee where the first dreaded dooryard violets, Viola sororia, were popping through the greening lawns. Color was definitely on the return, as I flew back to the tropical temperature in the Pacific Northwest.