Spring: it's started

The midday temperature is about 40F. The road is about half mud. Wild River State Park is demonstrating how to tap a maple tree. The snow on the roof is melting and the drips are forming icicles and then mud. Eventually, the groundwater will get recharged. Runoff will reach the Sunrise River and then the St. Croix. Spring's high water will, in several months, become Summer's lower flows. By then, sap will have been turned to syrup. Eggs will have turned to hatchlingsand then nestlings and then a new generation of birds will be on the wing. If we're lucky and pay attention, we'll notice and enjoy at least some of these changes. Seeds will sprout, flowers blossom, butterflies and bees pollinate and fruits and seeds develop. Life's annual cycle continues. As far as we know, it couldn't happen without water.

the start of Spring's flows

Photo by J. Harrington

Here are today's Shades of Green with links to color definition and images.

• Almond Green:          Definition     Images
• Apple Green:             Definition     Images
• Arnaudon's Green:    Definition     No Images
  obsolete color

Doesn't Spring, with it's rebirth and regrowth and returning of migrants seem like the beginning of the year? When you think of the seasons, do you think of life, including your own, more as a circle, or as a straight line? Scientists claim we are comprised of atoms that started, billions of years ago, in the stars. Joni Mitchell, years and years ago, wrote in her haunting hit  Woodstock: "we are star dust, we are golden." Could this mean we are the ultimate recyclables. That would fit with Einstein's concept that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, wouldn't it?. Do you suppose we'll ever manage to redefine capitalism from creative destruction to creative reuse and recycling? I hope so, because it's looking more and more to me as if that's likely to be the way we'll be around long enough to "get ourselves back to the garden."

Recycling Center

By Brenda Hillman 

The labeled bins on the California hillside

catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars.

Families pull up with their interesting trash

and start unloading: Here, sweetheart,

this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle

hits with a thud. Diet soda cans

spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun-

permitting bottles from a day’s pleasure

are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children

who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic,

as matter greets itself and starts to change.

What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered

into the bin, we could see it waiting there,

could believe everything is alive and specific

and personal, could tell by the tilt of one

bottle against the next that it’s difficult

to be singular, to have identity, to keep

an outline safe in the terrors of space.

Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts,

tossing it in; and the bottle lies there

in the two o’clock position, temporarily itself,

before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . .

And what if some don’t want to. What if some items

in the piles of paper, the orange and blue

envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers

pressing through the cloudy windows

with our names, some among those pale sheets curled

with moisture, would rather stay as they are.

It’s spring; we’ve thrown away mistakes—

tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized

drafts of poems—that which was blank

shall be made blank again—but what if

that failed letter wants to be a failure,

not go back to pulp, and thought .. .

Or across the parking lot, where light insists

on changing the dull cans, a few cans don’t want

to be changed, though they should want to,

shouldn’t they, should want to be changed

by light, light which is called sweet reason,

honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes

from the parking lot looking helpless

though it is matter that has been betrayed. . .

All afternoon the bins are carried off

by those who know about where things should go,

who are used to the clatter the cans make,

pouring out; and the families, who believed change

would heal them are pulling away in their vans,

slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . .

The bins fill again with hard substances,

the hills bear down with their fugitive gold,

the pampas grass bending low to protect

what was briefly certain and alive with hope. 

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