souvenir de printemps

Past Danielle seems to be conversing with my present state, leaving hints and clues of what is happening now, premonitions of what is to come. This was written two years ago, April 16th, and is still true:
Every day of spring is better than the last. I love that about it. Each day I say, "This! Here! This is really spring! Today is the first day!"
And more flowers are unveiled and the sky gets more and more blue, and everything--even the air--becomes delicious.
Warmth, vibrant colors, the feel of grass.
It is almost easy to miss the changes on campus, because we are so walled in by buildings. I have to remind myself to look up, look around, look out, listen to those birds. And once you first start, you cannot believe the noise the birds can make, and it becomes amazing to you that anyone could sleep soundly through all that.
A week and a half ago, I drove my car off campus just to get away from school and to notice spring. It is hard to notice in the place where you spend all your time, like the way you don't notice that a friend you see every day has grown taller. There was classical music on the radio, WMHT I think, it was a cello concerto by Dvorak, and the strings became the telephone wires singing down the road, the pavement and later the dirt flowing out beneath my tires. I was driving because I didn't want to stop listening to the music, and while I drove anywhere, nowhere, I went, somewhere. It was a place where the music ran like sap through the veins of the trees and hints and promises and tempting glimpses of the finale appeared in the haze of flower and leaf buds. It is only in silence that a sound can exist and be observed, and perhaps likewise spring feels so joyous as a result of winter's hush and the stillness of snow. Spring would be diminished were there not the space and quiet of winter to anticipate its arrival. There is an injunction to stop, and wait, and observe what will unfold.

If we do some further archaeology, here is a poem scribbled on the margins of an article "The Trouble with wilderness" by William Cronon, 2 weeks prior to the above. It stands in response to a single line quoted from Owen Wister: "That moment in the year when winter is gone and spring not come, and the face of Nature is ugly."

The face of nature is not ugly
there are hints and happenings,
preparations for the spring, and the
gradual gathering of greenery behind the wings
it is so gradual that you don't know
until afterwards that it has been taking
place--you only know once spring
has sprung.
I want to fall in love that way,
the gradual budding and unfolding of the heart
until it seems so natural to open your
petals to the warm sun and blue sky,
and you are amazed that things could
be so green, and you, oblivious to the
change while it was taking place.
Every spring can only be the first
spring, the true one, all others buried in
layers of dust and dry leaves in the corners
of our memories, not quite as bright
and breezy as the one expanding
before us this moment.