Spring Foretold
For the past few weeks (given my new abundance of time), I’ve been keeping an eye our neighbor’s front yard, if a three by three foot patch of dirt can be called a front yard. In this unlikely haven have sprouted three bunches of grass and one bunch of daffodils, all improbably deciding to rear their green heads above the soil at the end of January, perhaps lulled to the surface by the weeks of warm weather and sunshine. Perhaps they felt lonely, given that, besides the half-assed crooked string of lights that appeared before Christmas, and an inexplicably impeccably shoveled sidewalk, I’ve seen no signs of life from the house, which rests a mere sixteen inches from our own.
In any case, nature having the sense of humour that it does, these foot soldiers in nature’s never-ending battle to reclaim our concrete canyons were greeted to this world by twenty inches of snow. I worried, I fussed; I feared that they had entered the ring too soon, that the snowy burial and single digit temperatures would spell their doom. I briefly considered brushing off the snow and putting little greenhouses around them, but decided that wasn’t the best way to introduce myself to my neighbors) I should have known better. The sun came out, the snows melted; my little emerald friends still surged for the sky. Would it be cheesy to say I draw strength from their resilience? I’m no sure that I do in any case, but they are currently the only greenery going on our block of Washington St, and they do make me happy. So I’ll be rooting for them, not like they need it.