To Everything

A vast stir of clouds catches the rising moon's light, and strews luminous folds of drapery, carried by a wind unfelt below, veiling and unveiling star-flecked patches of darkness. Hours pass, and the moon emerges from the tattering veils, filling the world with objects and their shadows. The deep-throated hoot of an owl sounds again and again, then moves southward swiftly, to sound from another stand of pines. I hear two frogs croaking in different pitches, alternating, as though in conversation. This reminds me that the first sound I heard on awakening yesterday was a chorus of frogs. Emerging from sleep, at first I thought I was hearing the echo of a dream, but opening the window to the cold, bright day, I realized that there were indeed frogs, in January. They too, like the camellia bushes, must believe that spring has arrived. I hope they are mistaken. Not yet through with winter, I would regret the early arrival of my favorite season. Best that it creep in at the end of March, to fill the lengthening afternoons with color and fragrance, softness and filtered light, and not displace the chill and harsher days from their due and proper time. Whatever discomfort might thereby befall the over-anxious frogs as a result of their premature emergence, I desire this iciness, and that the air should continue to bite my ears and make my skin pleasantly shiver, while I brood and anticipate the glories to come. Let the frogs burrow back into the muddy banks and wait until it is their time. I like their song, but better now I like the owl's hoot, so suited to the bare and raw nights of stark moonlight or tumbling wrack of storms.

Displaced

Today I saw gladiolus blossoms. The vegetable kingdom is going crazy. Mere brightness brings flowers, despite the continued cold. I saw a bee, too. It was crawling on the brick ledge alongside the front porch. I don't know if it had been injured, or was simply dying of hypothermia, but dying it clearly was. It wobbled about in a patch of sunlight, unable to fly, and finally fell from the ledge into the shade of a bush, where I could no longer see its struggles. Overhead, the sun illuminated the blindingly white ramparts of drifting clouds that decorated the blue sky. Nearby, the rain-fed moss covering the mulberry tree's trunk was plushy and deep green, and paler mosses carpeted the walkway leading to it, as they do in winter's depths. The contrasts of the day were too much for me. I retreated indoors and read a book until night fell and the sky was filled with stars. I have no tolerance for details these days. I desire the enveloping darkness, and the still air that says nothing.