Clouds dissipate like the memory of dreams in the waking sky of afternoon. Unveiled sun drenches damp trees with light. The new oak leaves glow pale green against widening blue brushed with lingering strands of white. As always after rain, the sourgrass holds bright beads of water longer than other plants, and its dark green clumps sparkle with captured sunbeams and the passing day's reflection. The first lilies have bloomed, and are like creamy fragments of sunlit cloud snagged on green stalks. Several camellia blossoms have fallen intact to the ground, and lie there like reflections of those which droop among the overhanging leaves, soon to join them. Briefly do the flowers bloom before they fall among the gnarled roots of the trees which tower above them. The enduring change of seasons feeds the slow change of decades and centuries. When the trees have gone, the seasons will remain and bring the transient efflorescence of spring afternoons, ages on end.