I haven’t gone on a walk longer than 5 miles in over two weeks, so this morning I headed over to the arboretum to wander the trails for as long as it took for me to become trail-weary. I was hoping I might find many many signs of spring along the trail, and in fact there were buds breaking out at the tips of some branches of some trees, or shoots of green poking up through the dead grass here and there, and even a few patches of water cress in the springs along Lake Wingra, or big clumps of green algae in the swamps in the southwestern corner of the south unit, but for the most part the overall colors of the arboretum are still brown and gray. Lots and lots of brown and gray. I got the feeling it might stay that way for at least another week.