Early spring day

The skies are gray.  The rain drips and puddles in the road.  Freshets of brown, cold water drain from the fields and forest into the roads and into the storm drains.

The black tar roads are cracked and riven with the abuse of winter.  The world lies broken like a patient in the emergency room recently rescued from an avalanche.

There is no green yet.  That comes later.  In a few weeks’ time the great earth will shake off its morbidity and spring to life in an explosion of verdancy.

Not today.

Today the temperature hovers a few notches above freezing.  Shoals of brown sand and gravel direct the runoff water along the cracked roads.  The snow clings in desultory piles to its shrinking domain.  All is brown and gray and damp and cold.

There is a certain tension to it.  The birds are frantically mating and building for the new summer.  They know in their prehistoric brains, their DNA dinosaur coding, that there are things that NEED to be done and time is short.

Plastic buckets hang vampire like to sugar maple trees in the woods.  Draining their arboreal life into the gullets of man.  Even in these gray days our race finds a way to stuff our maws.  Your roots may reach deeply but our hunger reaches deeper.  Manifest destiny.

Trash peeks out of the rotting snow banks and out from under the sand on the road shoulders.  Mostly the chromium glint of beer cans.  Some celebratory football victory party flung from car windows like an offering to whom?  The gods of trash?  The gods of don’t give a fuck?

Man is the great catch 22.  The great creator.  The great destroyer.  Playing all at the same time.  Set upon the universe.  Blob-like.  Aspiration muddied with desperation.  The push and pull of a broken and frenetic psyche.

But the earth abides.  The lichened rocks lie where we stacked them in the fields.  They lie there uncaring until the geological forces of another age folds them in a slow dance of reconstruction.  They lie under the snow and under the summer weeds.  The rocks know things we do not.

Our lives, our centuries are brief.  The turning of the universe is infinite.  We are just a brief burning of a candle, the flicker of sentience in a rock filled world.  We are a temporary muddying of the water.

My feet crunching in the road grit make a mechanical sound.  My breath come out in a cloud of steam.  An occasional snow flake flies with the drizzle across the road.  The day feels industrial.  Like I am running through some derelict factory.  The feel of old, wet cement.

The brown water in the ditches, the sleet, the sap in the trees, my sweat, my breath, my blood – all recycled water.  The juice of the earth.  The sweat from the couplings of a thousand warriors.

In a few weeks, the land will rise and shake itself free f this gray trance.  We will celebrate and dance the green dances of spring and summer.  But it is in the gray mists of this world that our lives emerge.