Twenty Minutes of April 3rd

Photo by July on Unsplash

From where I sit by the window I can look right through the huge bare hydrangea and the trees whose needles make their way into and all over my house, and see in the distance that the forsythia is tinged with yellow, every day more and more. The forsythia is always the earliest bloomer. It appears before the grass is green, before the half of my yard which is a meadow turns into itself, before anything else even has buds. The huge locust, which is my favorite tree, is covered with lichen, something else I love, and whenever I see a fallen twig covered in flakes of gray and green I pick it up and stick it in whichever small vessel is still empty. When the locust gets its leaves, they are an excited light green, almost like neon, you can imagine a little kid hopping up and down, proud of being so bright and alive, but it sobers up as spring continues.

Good grief. I haven’t had a tv for thirty years but there are a couple of cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli on an unfamiliar kitchen counter. Like a commercial. My eyes must have closed by themselves and that’s what appeared when I dozed off. Childhood comes flooding back. My mother was the generation that suddenly had frozen food and canned corned beef hash and ravioli and even small peeled new potatoes in cans, and that’s what we ate. Except for Sunday lunches. I will never forget a particularly unsuccessful beef stew, the meat was unchewable, and our mother looked around the table and said in a proud rather challenging voice,“Good tough meat!” It must have been the fifties, I remember the house we lived in back then, and once again I’m down by the river picking up pieces of smooth glass and a small piece of jade that had lost its purpose. I look out the window where the sun is suddenly shining. There’s a crow wandering around on the sleeping meadow. Nice. What an interesting afternoon. I haven’t listened to the news. I’m enjoying what’s here now before it all disappears.