Interlude

The day before yesterday, I played tag with a spring robin.

But that’s another story.

The day before yesterday, I experienced the picture-perfect seminar, six of us in a loose semicircle around an enthusiastic professor on a comfortable green lawn by a tree on a stunning spring day; we all began cross-legged, attentive and formal, but as the three hours progressed the students began shifting, leaning back, and after a while most of us were sprawled out in one way or another, lying on our sides, stomachs, chins propped up on palms and folded hands. It was amazing. It was beautiful. Thick spring grass is more comfortable than any couch and, thanks to today’s especially marvelous weather, I’d chance to say that this time, it was more comfortable than any extra-long twin-sized college bed, no matter how richly furnished, because the beds had the disadvantages of being inside.

And with just enough of a cool breeze to counteract the ever-warming sun, I was in a state of supreme bliss.

Yesterday, I looked outside, looked at my errand list, looked at the assignment that I had barely just finished and the lecture that I was 20 minutes late to because of it, and said to myself, to heck with it, I’m going errand-running because I can be outside.

And as I strolled up campus, down campus, along the main street off-campus and got my errands done, black skirt billowing silkily in the beautiful spring breeze and feeling the wind curl around my ears, I didn’t regret a minute of it.

Today, I write this sitting in front of the university’s main Fountain, on the extended stone bench along the wall that borders the plaza, sitting under the row of magnificent flowering trees and typing while pear-shaped petals waft down to perch on my head. Delicate pink streaks up from the base of the petal’s convex side to white at the tip, sturdy and thick petals with a tinge of brown suggesting why they fell in the first place; the inside is white as bleached paper. and somehow whiter in its naturalness.

There is such incomprehensible beauty here that photographs cannot do even a fraction of one aspect any justice.

In the face of the changing seasons, how can I not hold nature in reverence?

As if in agreement, a petal fell onto my laptop and clung– pointing directly down at the sentence I was typing and perpendicular to the keyboard– onto the screen.