Sticky little leaves

The growth season hits with a bang in Siberia. (Summer in the minds of the locals and my Canadian wife- Spring in my mind.) We have had warm weather in the 20s for a week now, and I have been loving every minute of it. The sad news is that some cooler weather is coming this week, with a few days around 13 degrees, but it should hopefully warm right back up again after that.

There is already 16.5 hours of full sunlight a day (5:30 am to 10:00 pm). Combine that with the warmth and the plants have been growing at a break neck speed. Yesterday we were walking back from the swimming pool and I was touching the baby leaves on trees, that had a sticky texture to them. Today these leaves had grown to twice the size and were no longer sticky. I wish I had my camera on hand yesterday. Who would have thought that the plants could grow so fast, that a day would make a difference.

One of my readers pointed out that Dostoevsky made a reference to the "sticky little leaves." It comes from a poem called "The Grand Inquisitor", told by the character Ivan to Alyosha in "The Brothers Karamazov".


"Though I may not believe in the order of the universe
yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring
I love the blue sky, I love some people,
whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why

I love some great deeds done by men,
though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them,
yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them"


Walking through the forest on the way to church today, I noticed these tree saplings poppung up through the forest floor. I swear, that I had walked through there not a few days ago, and that is all new growth since then. Simply unbelievable to my eyes.


Why didn't I notice this spectacular growth last year? You can go back through my archives to where we were living a year ago, and you can see that it was a hole of a place to live in, and that there simply wasn't a lot of trees or flowers around to observe near our apartment. So we missed out on daily observations back then. Right now, there is something new to look at every day, which is lots of fun and very refreshing.







I still don't know what this bird is called, but it's a speedy little blighter that rarely stays still for a second, so it is very hard to get a good photo. If only I had 10 times optical zoom instead of 3 times.

The start of Summer is combined with an absence of hot water in the apartment for ten days. We went swimming yesterday, and one of the showers was supposed to have hot water (I guess they have their own heater). But the cold water at the moment for some reason is colder than normal (perhaps the heat from the hot water pipes usually keeps the cold water pipes warmer), so when the hot water came through the same pipe, it still came out cold instead of freezing cold. Another 6 days until we can have a shower, I am getting impatient now. Dishes are becoming a real pain as well.