Spring Rising on Singecat Ridge: original pastel

It’s April in Appalachia, and the songbirds are migrating North. My friend and I are walking on Singecat Ridge Trail, hoping to spot some scarlet tanagers. We have no tanager luck, but are wowed by another scene: the rising choir of green voices, brilliant and verdant in the valleys and hollers, but still a whisper on the ridgelines, a dream on the mountaintops. We stood in the saddle of the ridge and breathed in the green air, the song of Spring awakening our bodies from the long sleep of Winter.