When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
I. That day sorta felt like summer vacation, because of the light and the heat. Though I still converted ways to words, wished I and everyone else was as simply pleasant as the day. Two bright ankles under a whooshing skirt agitated those small white flowers I like, the ones which huddle by the grocery store entrance; the breeze of her steady passage fluffed them into meringue— Later, I told this to my mother, since she was visiting me, and, expectedly, she decided we needed a cake. II. My neighbor likes to smoke cigars when it rains. He creates Versailles on the porch in pungent rings, while the grunt of storm clouds makes slick white tongues of his well-tended garden. I’m envious of his patterns, though they stink. My little dog licks up the rainwater on our walks and peppers his mustache with flower petals, which I imagine tasting of tobacco. III. My sister had a second one which I looked after in my parents’ backyard. I stand at the base not believing that I’d never been impressed by the tree when I was young. Meanwhile she comes into her art, trying out verbs— wiggling cooing yawning gulp poking a squishy hand into the dirt, a gravedigger and creator of garden confetti. IV. I like to watch the shadows of his Michelangelo calves. I don't know who he is, the man who always starts wandering the neighborhood at the same moment each spring. Then the blossoms part their lips and drink the navy shade cast in his pastoral gait. The darkening of those bouquets fattens my eye every time. V. By the muscular roots of a tree near my apartment my friend stopped and thought of starting a poem, one pronouncing the pale to punch resurrection of the technicolor confidence of each thing— she’d caught this heralding from the inner veins of green in a pure white flower. Instead of adorning nouns with adjectives, she bought goat cheese and bread and brought it to me which made me quite happy. VI. My other friend dropped by yesterday and reminded me, while she read her poem about peaches, that all flowers arrive from childhood. She reminds me of a lot of things with her stories. In the pasture of a page, thoughts may turn white and can be (silently) either fair or virtuous— we recalled this fact together. Alone, as I write, I can't see the seasonal plopping of seedy, fat, heavy, pulpy fruit from my head falling upon tentative bloom below, because I aim to name the gratitude for the beginnings of things.