Spring

I am sitting in my dim bedroom right now. The house is napping. Silas is asleep in my bed feet from me with his blankie right up to his nose, his side rising and falling as he breathes. A talkative mourning dove is somewhere just beyond my closed blind letting her voice slide along the scale. I sit drinking lychee tea. My eyes feel tired.

This weekend I flew to DC alone to visit my friend Annemarie and her 3 week old baby. 3 week old 3rd baby, 3rd girl. Somehow in the midst of the nursing, constant diapering, playing gobbletjr with Madeleine (if you have a 5-7 year old, buy this), snapping barrettes in hair, making turkey sandwiches, praising Claire's Cinderella dress again, throwing clothes in the washing machine, folding the hot ones from the dryer, walking in the chilly rain, and all the other things that come with family existence, we were together. I love that.

Cold rain fell while I was there -- March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. I remember having big snows in March sometimes, and after the winter they've had, I expected the air to be bitter and for Spring to be weeks delayed. But through Annemarie's kitchen window under the grey sky, there were purple crocuses -- dozens and dozens of them beginning to bloom! And little arcing snowdrops opening their hanging white buds.

I love the thaw. How the bony black brown world becomes pricked with color. How you can watch life breathe back down the branches, across the dirt, see it nose up from dead bramble -- green birth.

I miss that here -- the sudden deep breath that sweeps through. The relief. How much winter's end feels like a kind of fresh promise.

On the way home last night, I read Neruda's "The Book of Questions" (his last volume of poetry in which every poem consists only of questions). I folded down the corner of this page:


XVII

Have you noticed that autumn
is like a yellow cow?

And how later the autumnal beast
is a dark skeleton?

And how winter collects
so many layers of blue?

And who asked springtime
for its kingdom of clear air?