...another meditation....

Today, as I contemplate yet more footnotes on my never-satisfied computer screen, I'm drawn instead to the second-story deck (which I will soon be without if the house sale actually happens), and not just because of the sunlight flooding the stained cedar, the furled brown umbrella, the indoor plants recently hauled outdoors to revive after a gray, utterly bizarre winter.   I'm thinking instead about how springtime exonerates Detroit, year after year, without fail, clothing this otherwise ugly, cemented, boarded-up city with unspeakably beautiful greenery, the yellow blaze of forsythia, blossoms on tulip trees, and soon apple and cherry blossoms unlike anything I've ever seen before.  Not in Minnesota, and not even in Washington, D.C., which is supposed to be famous for its cherry blossoms -- which blossoms, by the way, sprang to life almost a month early this year (how scary is THAT).  I have thought before, and I'm thinking again this time, that the incredible surprise that one senses with this sudden decision to simply burst forth, to exhale and begin to breathe again, to clothe everything brown and grey in ravishing colors, is partly a function of Detroit itself.  The colors are much brighter, I suspect, than what they would be anywhere else.....achingly beautiful actually, against the unrelieved drabness of the center city.  So, for now, I think I'm going to spend an hour on the deck watching it happen, drinking it all in, letting it fill me with something other than a sense of foreboding, which has been too much a part of my life recently.  I send love to all.

svb