Spring

I will have two springs this year-- this one underway in Texas & the next in the Arctic. On our walks, Ada looks for pink Indian paintbrush in the meadow & Whitman dances from flower to flower, showering them with exhortations of one sort or another in indiscernible, bright syllables. The wind sculpts columnar clouds reft by the last of the migrating birds. The cormorants amassed last week in a days-long volley to the west, weeks after the robins passed through. Now, the cedar waxwings alight on the boughs of the tall cedars & live oaks, watching the waves of the lake lap against the stone of the shore. The thunderstorms sneak in at dusk & explode in the smallest hours of the night, cacophonous symphonies of light & long-sustained sound, a kind of echo chamber of rumble & roil. In the morning the sun dapples the wet grass & the street is lined with runnels choked with battered leaves. On those mornings I can walk in the wind without falling prey to the pollen it usually carries. 


Whitman grows more garrulous each day, interspersing actual English with his a glottal language of his own devising more & more routinely. This morning as I changed his diaper he said “shit” over & again, delighted with himself. Ada makes intricate drawings of dinosaurs & mammals & birds & dragons & shoots through the day like a comet, full of fire & color, unconcerned with the debris in her contrail. Kristin flies the Stinson, then the Cessna, weeks away now from her license. & I await our pending move, eager to lay claim to our new lives. Everything proceeds, everything moves along. “& still they overflow, the cruel, indifferent colors of Now.” 


I feel a change in the shape of the grief I’ve carried. I can’t as viscerally inhabit those weeks in Missouri, that time having slid somehow into memory rather than lingering as a kind of sense still on my skin, still before my eyes. The grief is making itself perhaps more enduringly companionable, having asserted its presence, ferreted out a room in the chambers of my heart, hung its pictures on the wall. It is my tenant now, & it will make its demands forever, I don’t doubt, but now we seem to co-abide a bit better rather than partaking in the long parade of my being utterly overwhelmed by it. Maybe my children are forcing the hands of those other energies, corralling joy & gathering hope, summoning again some strength. What a curiosity how physically they all seem to sing their songs in your body, from ache to rapture, quite without a thought. Nonetheless, the concept of tomorrow begins to take shape, permitted again to clarify, emerge from the maw. 


Which is all just to say that time has contrived to do what it does, & here we are.


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