Green Thoughts

I could smell the grass for the first time this year as I drove past Patterson Park tonight. The mothers of an extended Mexican family, the ones who own the liquor store on South Patterson Park Avenue, took their kids over to the park. They all held hands, three mothers and four children, who ranged in ages from twoish to sevenish, and crossed the street, a human daisy chain. Today the birds sang outside the window, having made a nest in some undetermined location on the back of our house. The day reminded me of when I read "Tintern Abbey" in college:

"And I have felt
a presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth . . ."

It's so good to be alive! Spring has inspired me to work on a new story. A line, an ending, came to me a few days back that I wanted to form a story around: "only you would call it dying." What often consider life is such prepackaged death these days. Thank goodness winter is over and we can concentrate again on good things now and forever.