Spring Again
It’s still cold, and in the late afternoons, when I go running, I’m still in my parka. The air is clean and chill, and I can see my breath. The woods, on either side of the road, are still brown and grey. Nothing is green. Spring is keeping herself dar – though I know she’s around: the bare grey branches are full of birdsong. The red-winged blackbirs have arrived, with their lovely liquid purling trills, and last week I saw a flock of robins in the field.
Down the road there’s a small pond – just a widening of the stream, really – a sheet of dark water, with a bottom of dead leaves. The pair of mallards is back, and every afternoon I see them busy there, the trim patterns of their feathers rich against the smooth water. They duck their heads into it, paddling about, feeding on something. I can taste the water: cold and clear and woodsy.
There’s something else, though, further evidence. In the boggy parts along the road, where the hillside starts to fall away into the woods, the aliens have arrived. Rising slowly from the dead browns of last year’s foliage are motionless spirals of leaves, twisting up through the swampy ground like unearthly corkscrews.
Why are spotted things so strange, so sinister? These leaves are otherworldly and alarming. They’re mottled and striped; they’re rotten-brown, electric-green, birthmark-purple, bruise-yellow. The flecks and spots are everywhere, tiny and dark, myriad and ominous, like insects. The leaves are wide and fleshy and tortuous. They curl, writhing slowly around their own thick center, roiling upwards to a sharp pointed tip: it’s the lowly and fabulous skunk cabbage.
First plant of the season, spring’s handwritten anouncement. Everything surrounding it is old, dry, cast-off, dead, but this doesn’t matter. These strange, spotted, twisted leaves have appeared again – rising up from the wintry earth, potent, vivid, thick with life, reminding us that there’s a lot we don’t know, theat beauty is more varied and foreign than we remembered – and so has spring.
April 5, 2004
Down the road there’s a small pond – just a widening of the stream, really – a sheet of dark water, with a bottom of dead leaves. The pair of mallards is back, and every afternoon I see them busy there, the trim patterns of their feathers rich against the smooth water. They duck their heads into it, paddling about, feeding on something. I can taste the water: cold and clear and woodsy.
There’s something else, though, further evidence. In the boggy parts along the road, where the hillside starts to fall away into the woods, the aliens have arrived. Rising slowly from the dead browns of last year’s foliage are motionless spirals of leaves, twisting up through the swampy ground like unearthly corkscrews.
Why are spotted things so strange, so sinister? These leaves are otherworldly and alarming. They’re mottled and striped; they’re rotten-brown, electric-green, birthmark-purple, bruise-yellow. The flecks and spots are everywhere, tiny and dark, myriad and ominous, like insects. The leaves are wide and fleshy and tortuous. They curl, writhing slowly around their own thick center, roiling upwards to a sharp pointed tip: it’s the lowly and fabulous skunk cabbage.
First plant of the season, spring’s handwritten anouncement. Everything surrounding it is old, dry, cast-off, dead, but this doesn’t matter. These strange, spotted, twisted leaves have appeared again – rising up from the wintry earth, potent, vivid, thick with life, reminding us that there’s a lot we don’t know, theat beauty is more varied and foreign than we remembered – and so has spring.
April 5, 2004
posted by Roxana Robinsonat
10:00 AM 
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home