Something Prosey

It always begins simply enough. Though the beginning of spring is often quiet, you can sense the change of the seasons nonetheless. The ground softens. The early morning grass is slick with moisture. There's a crispness remaining in the air that still makes your breath fog when you exhale, but it doesn't steal the air from your throat.

The raucous, repeating rhythm of a cardinal's call fills the air, accompanied by the lonesome, plaintive cry of a mourning dove. Birds' voices, once familiar, now nearly forgotten, now return on the winds. The canopy above, still bare, still filled with thousands of fingers clawing at the sky, is alive with whistles, peeps and calls. Birds flit from one branch to another, calling--constantly calling--to one another, proclaiming "Here I am!" or "This tree is mine" or simply to broadcast the joy of the warm sun on their breast.

The earth stretches, waking from a long winter's hibernation. As it stretches, it works the warmth of the sun, the vibrancy of its rays into the deep and cold places beneath it. It drinks of the morning's dew, absorbs the day's heat, revels in the passing rain, practically dancing beneath the drops as they fall from the heavens.

The earth-brown forest floor, long slumbering beneath a thick layer of brown, dry leaves becomes lush and green overnight. A verdant carpet spreads itself between the trees, waking them. The wooden fingers stretch toward the sky, tiny buds displaying themselves, blooming forth, and then falling away as the canopy slowly asserts itself once more. The birds are hidden, but their songs have a more lasting, more haunting quality to them now.

The thrumming of a woodpecker echoes through the trees, invisible behind the young, fresh leaves. Squirrels laugh and chitter, chasing one another up and down trees, around the boughs and boles, along the forest floor. Deer, always timid and quiet, seek the quiet and the darkness of the deep forest, venturing forth to nibble upon the fresh, delicious fare around the edges of the woods.

Now the wind sighs, carrying not the bitter teeth of winter, but the promise of warmth and the piquant aroma of life reawakening. Gentle is its song, carrying the susurrations of the leaves waving in the wind and the calls of the birds, and rain, far distant, but promised by the evening.

To stand among it all--wind, trees, earth--is to revel in the joy of life itself, in the reawakening of the world as it looks upon the warm spring sun. Standing amongst it, taking it in, enjoying it for the very pleasures it promises, the life-giving and sustaining forces it offers, one is left to wonder one thing:

"When the fuck are those goddamned squirrels going to stop climbing on my birdfeeder?"