Slow Greening

The neighbors grass is getting green. Not ours because we don't have grass yet. (A point that hasn't gone unnoticed by the homeowners association. "When are you getting grass," they ask via email and ever-so politely, "We are all looking forward to enjoying your landscaping." Fuckers. I'd like them better if they just said, "Your front lawn made up of mud and weeds is bringing downthe neighborhood." I told Partner to tell them we can't afford it since we are saving up for sperm. Or that we're going for an environmentally friendly patch of native plants and shrubs and have opted out the green lawn mania.) Anyhow, the grass is no longer brown, but a distinct shade of yellow, with some green edges and patches. It's Michigan, so this is all a super tease because no doubt we will have a giant snow before spring really comes to stay. I drove home with my car window open yesterday. I slept with a window cracked up last night. I took the garbage can out in my pajamas this morning, which are short sleeved, with no coat, scarf, hat, gloves, thermal underwear, woolly socks, balaclava or long length of rope to guide me back to the house in the middle of a blizzard. It was blissful.

This poem might be more appropriate for the last day of April as we move into May, but on this eve of a pleasant sounding month (as opposed to such ugly words as January and February) I offer you this Philip Larkin:

The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.