Spring

[mallorys_camera]

Willows are always the first to green up.

Then, for two weeks or so before the first leaves appear on the other trees, when you drive past those trees, the trees seem... hazy: Their branches are bare, but there's a difference in hue you can only sense with your peripheral vision.

Then, boom! The twigs have sprouted tiny flowers, and boom! again, those flowers have become leaves.



The whole process takes place very fast in maples and poplars; tree flower to tender green leaf only takes about three days. Oak trees are slower. But anyway, it's spring!



I continue to be very, very lazy.

And isolated: Communication is actually a bit of a chore. Every word that comes out of my mouth, every sentence that materializes from my keyboard, feels clumsy somehow. Stilted. The prosody is off. Or something. Whatever it is, it makes me not want to talk to anybody. Or write.

And apolitical: World War III may well be incubating, but I find I do not have the energy to care.

And inert: I force myself to tromp because it's the only way to build up physical strength. But I'm not enjoying it much. That might well be because there really aren't as many pleasant tromping paths in Ulster County as there were in Dutchess County.

###

I have been reading a lot. Just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which is am amazing novel, particularly when you contrast the simplicity, even banality, of its prose with its emotional impact. Ostensibly science fiction, it's the type of science fiction whose speculations are filled with small holes—But why didn't they just run away? But why didn't they just grow laboratory organs?—but which somehow paints a compelling portrait from the inside out of what it feels like to be the Other. It's the accretion of all those small, seemingly unimportant details, I suppose. Ishiguro did something very similar in his earlier The Remains of the Day, a novel whose subject matter could not be more unlike Never Let Me Go.

I cried for ten minutes after I turned the last page. Kathy H's solitiquy about plastic bags stuck on a fence, flapping in the wind! Of course, I am primed to cry these days.

And now I need something else to read!