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Listen on posterous
Last year, at the beginning of winter, scientists made a terrifying discovery—the universe, they said, is beige. Perhaps not so terrifying when you consider how they came about their conclusion and the reasons for which they sought the conclusion, but as a sentence—The universe is beige.—is terrifying to me. I dislike beige. Beige is the terrible neutral, which shares the same parent as neuter.
Last Sunday morning I was walking in a lovely desolation of early streets and I heard the first robin. As a child I learned that the robins sing “Cheer up! Cheer up!”. I wasn’t raised here in Utah, but in the Northeast where robins return from somewhere. They inexplicably appear when winter is sure in it’s ending. That song is absolute. Winter is finished. Here, where winter is a spasmodic sharing of snow and sun and a hopping thermometer, robins don’t bother to disappear. They stay year round, hunting worms between snowstorms. However, they still know when winter is finished and they sing it. First one hopeful bird makes a declaration on an early morning before sunrise. Then, today, I step outside before full light and each block (or however it is that robins make sense of their fences) has it’s robin declaring the happy news.
Two weeks ago the crocuses got busy and tulips and daffodils and hyacinths caught the mood. The wiry grape hyacinths and starflowers have been stealthily reaching up and out for awhile now. They’re seductive—I know how beautiful they are in bloom, beautiful enough to keep themselves in the yard. The trees by the lake and the trees on the side of the mountains are swelling at their tips. The willows and the cottonwoods by the river are blushing green.
In the marsh between the airport and the lake, hidden in the rich black of decaying stems, are peepers, little insistent frogs. Their cold blood is saturated with so much Spring they brave ice and frost starved herons to throw their tiny glistening necklaces up into the restlessness of last year’s reeds and then around the urgent shoots of this year’s. A few at first, backing up out of the warming muck to sing. In two weeks the winter’s full seizure of mud will relax and the marsh will be filled with a million pulsing and shining and living beads.
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