In Just Spring

I was driving to work last week and suddenly realized that the trees lining the road were covered in a green haze of new buds.  The leaves had not yet opened, of course, so one could still see the outlines of trunks and branches, some graceful, some spiky and knobbly from relentless prunings or parasites.  Their graceful shadows striped the road and snaked up the adobe walls, curving with them. The fields and ditches and arroyos and fields were a blend of golden willow, beige stubble, silver-grey trunks and dark tangles of bushes, plus that bright new green.  It seemed to have happened overnight, and I cought my breath in sudden recogniztion:  it's spring!

I thought of the ee cummings poem, "in just spring, when all the world is puddle-wonderful..."  No, this is not the wet East, this is high desert:  there are no wonderful puddles.  There is some mud-lusciousness near the river, and, as I caught a glimpse of the lamb suckling its mother, I could almost hear that little lame balloon man's whistle.  But not quite.  I can delight in the sudden signs of spring, the yellow dandelions and daffodils, the tender newness of everything; but I'm driving to work, exhausted from my three-weeks-and-counting bout of respiratory virus.  The roads are dusty, and the gale-force winds stir up the dust and juniper pollen, covering my car in a thin layer of brown and making me sneeze.

I think back to my old spring rituals:  walking to the pioneer cemetary in Monmouth, looking for the hillside of violets; driving to Tryon Creek State Park in Portland to see the trillium; trimming the pussy willows in my yard and arranging the shoots in large ceramic vases.  Now the ritual is going to the Botannic Gardens in Albuquerque, or visiting the bosque and watching the cottonwoods burst into green, almost as I watch. I still color the Easter eggs, last year with G, this year with V.  And I sing the hymns as I drive "Praise to the Lord, the almighty the king of creation."  I may not believe in the deity (the jury's still out on that), but I believe in the joy, and am grateful for the ever-new, ever-timeless growth and change.

I think I hear that goatfooted balloon man.