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I love wearing clip-on sunglasses over my glasses when I go out. ^[1] Concealing my eyes. People can't tell when I am looking at them, and I can look as long as I want. Some of them also think that I can't see them looking at me. In my all-black spy-chic. ^[2] Makes you bold, makes you develop swagger. Walking like a superhuman makes them hold their gaze. Evokes, in some of the boys, visual investigation, even a little smile. ^[3] (!) And my face following them a bit, the lift of one side of the mouth, the eyebrows telling them I like what I see too.
 

Spring, spring, spring, finally. At last, the time when one can wear clip-on sunglasses, when one can swagger. Anticlimactic: A month ago we had a week or two of summer. Then there were days of spring. Then weeks off and on of fall, in this schizophrenic corner of the continent. A little taste of balmy perfect season, a little taste of wind-whippy drizzly miserable season, back to back. Human-induced global climate change? Did we drive the weather crazy? Or was this region always plagued by madness?
 

But now, boys lay on the lawns under trees with their shirts off and with bare feet. Now boys play frisbee (one day I will have the courage to ask them if I can join.) Now the chipmunks have come aboveground to dash boldly from trash can to trash can. Now I can consistently find a parking spot on Fourth Street right by my building. And my friends and I can hang out at Dominick's (no longer clogged with undergrads,) sitting in the patio by the fountain drinking sangria. And I can go to Cafe Zola and sit at one of the sidewalk tables in the sun all afternoon. Reading and listening to the waitress speak French with the people at the next table over.
 

I always pass by this one house on William where the guy sits out on his porch reading, blasting Billie Holiday from the stereo inside so that it floods the sidewalk. ^[4] One time he was blasting one of the Rachmaninoff concertos. It is too bad he is old and ugly because otherwise listening to his Billie Holiday you would want to go up his porch and kiss him. Too much romance in this world right now. ^[5] Like the lilac bushes under my kitchen window, with their smell wafting in, blending with the flavors of breakfast. ^[6] It makes you realize: Human beings are the ones capable of the most extreme pain and also the most sublime pleasure. In a bad moment your whole head turns against you. And on the other hand every nerve ending can give you a signal of Yes. To the point that the sheer existence of the flesh you are made out of feels good. ^{[7] [8]}
 

No wonder our kind invented sin. No wonder we invented guilt and redemption. No wonder we invented heaven and hell. It comes to us in pieces all the time. Today, God has placed a little wafer of heaven on my tongue. A week ago, a miniature hell burned inside my skull. ^[9] A taste of one, a taste of another, back to back. A little bit extreme, a little bit crazy. We are resilient creatures, though. We have many strategies to survive even an ice age. I will consume every bit of spring I can get my hands on now, and store it inside for a later time if need be.
 

alecia: Two general comments-- First, a little critical (though equivocal) observation: at the beginning, the sentence fragments were a bit jarring, maybe because they were so frequent. As I got used to them, I stopped noticing, though. Might be a bit smoother of a read if the fragments were more spaced out in the first two paragraphs. Second, as another spring-lover, this piece makes me so happy. In Berkeley, the magnolias in January made me happy in many of the ways you're talking about here. :) I like how you begin with very specific observations and anecdotes of your spring, then pull it larger to good-evil-heaven-hell, then bring it all back to yourself in the closing. samira: Rat, I am very behind in my commenting--this has been up for a month and if you want more than a thumbs up, like comments running down the sides, lemme know. But otherwise, I liked it a lot. Add comment