A Capital Spring Day

Rarely have I seen a season on this spinning earth make its entrance with such perfect, almost stereotypical grandeur.

Yesterday was gray and raw and sparse, the birds and beasts and even the rocks themselves seeming to flee from the scudding clouds, riding the wind. The night came, and all was silent.

And then this morning, it had all changed. Remarkably warm, the day began in the dark with the birds gathered in a holy choir loft that very much resembled a bowl of trees and fences. They sang the sun into the sky, and they spent the day announcing their joy, their intentions, their meditations, their feathered vocations.

When the sun was high, it moved across a landscape come alive. Bees and flies and wasps moved in the clear air, and rabbits and groundhogs hunched across grassy stretches and across muddy roads.

Arriving home this evening, I walked in the woods and watched all the surprises and the tricks and the gambols of the living world beneath my feet. The trees murmured above me and the ground, oh, the ground, it was covered with the green rug that someone rolled all over the hills during the night.

I came back down for supper, and my hair was well-tousled from the stiff wind. Brushing with the help of the bathroom mirror, I noticed for the first time how thin the silver is getting back there on my noggin. I called my wife and told her, “Looks like I’m getting a bald spot.”

She smiled and cooed over this newest sign of aging on her husband, and she gave me the de rigeur Texas benediction: “Bless your heart.”

As she turned back to the kitchen, I mused aloud, “It sort of looks like a tonsure.”

My wife stopped. Turned. Looked at me. Frowned. Shook her head. And said, “I do not like that word. That’s a bad word.”

She turned again to go, then looked back one more time.

“It sounds….medical,” she said, and went to cook.

~ S.K. Orr