Photo of the Day: ‘Trees All Cover'd With Blossoms’

“Apple orchards, the trees all cover'd with blossoms;

Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green;

The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning;

The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun;

The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers.”—American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), “Out of May's Shows Selected,” New York Herald, May 10, 1888

I must confess here to a bit of poetic—or, to be more accurate, photographic—license. I took this picture a year ago, but it was not in one of the apple orchards that Whitman memorably conjured up here, but on the street where I live in Bergen County, N.J.

Still, I hope I’ll be forgiven. The image I wanted to preserve here was one of beauty—and one that, perhaps, so many of us can use now, stuck as we are in our homes more than we want to, amid this coronavirus outbreak.