Green Again

The sun has liberated our flowering trees from their loads of wet snow and allowed the bunnies to resume their nibbling after two days of hungry confusion. Though we're missing a few tree limbs, tulip petals and water pipes, we have emerged from May's midwinter. To add bubbles to my champagne glass, I was excused from jury duty this morning when the civil case I was assigned to was dropped or settled. The judge who came to relieve us of our duty assured us that our presence in the courtroom had been useful because the mere thought of a jury drove the participants to settle rather than to go to trial. The forty of us who scrambled out of the assembly room were too jubilant to be worried about utility; we modestly hustled out the door with our eyes lowered, only giving vent to fist pumps, guilty chuckles and broad smiles after the door slammed shut behind us. I spent the morning catching up on my poetry class and my emails, and I want to share the following, strangely appropriate poem:

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

- Wallace Stevens