Let me count the ways

Bullfrogs croaking in the marshy places and in the vernal pools

Blue wildflowers in a little wood next to a house (are they Baby Blue Eyes? I wish! What a name!)

Skunk cabbages in muck

A warmish day after yesterday's obligatory cold, hard rain off the ocean, perilously close to sleet

Clearing the gardens of their leaf duvets

The yellowish-green stubs of hosta and day lily

Turtles warming in the sun

Weeds

The robin scouting the bush next to our door for its annual nest, and periodically attacking the window above it, as if seeing a rival in the glass

The melting of the last of the snow pile at the end of the driveway

Sitting on the deck for a chilly five minutes, but sitting on the deck

Spring

It was a quiet week,

for the governor of the fair state of Maine was on vacation in Jamaica. The embarrassing stories carried on, however: the US Department of Labor, which funded most of the cost of the infamous mural taken down by LePage, is suing to get its money back; Maine's attorney general says that LePage was only exercising the government's right of free speech (!) in removing it; a bunch of Republican (!) state senators penned a public letter asking the Gov to cool the rhetoric; some of those obnoxious rollbacks of environmental regulations are grinding to a halt. The continued banning of BPA, for example, looks safe, a double embarrassment, for the proposed new law was written by industry, then rejected by LePage's own party.

But these stories don't have the piquancy, the cringing fascination of the man in the flesh. Come back soon, Governor. We miss those rhetorical stink bombs, like the ones of the character sharing your initials, Pepe Le Pew.

Vulgar vibrancy

I'd like to apply this phrase to our cold and slow-arriving spring and to the skunk cabbage pushing its energetic and slightly ugly way through the muck and melted snow of late winter. In the woods of Maine it's really the first sign of spring, generating its own heat to fight its way through the icy earth, from nothing to green in an explosion of cells. But the phrase does not originate that way. It was used in a recent email from the son of a dear friend, writing in the terrible weeks between the diagnosis of his father's brain tumor, and its excision.

"Vulgar," I assume, because of the base intentions of the tumor, and the crude, angry feelings spilling over everywhere; "vibrancy" because of the tremendous outpouring of help and hope from family and friends, and the chance to be with his parents and his brothers, walking on the beach, eating his father's famous stew, senses heightened and alive. Like most families this one is scattered, brought together principally by holidays, this time by an illness, scattered again after a successful operation, warmed by the blessings of this terrible curse.

The first sign of spring in Massachusetts is the crocus, fragile yet strong even under the snow of the April Fool's Day storm, clinging to color and joy. Vulgar and vibrant, hope is the thing with leaves. More power to us fools.

Sands

If you look at life from the point of view of sand on a beach, high tides re-shape your surface twice a day. You are re-born.

Or they wipe it clean twice a day. You are obliterated.

Depends if you look at tides as half-full or half-empty.

On the one hand it would be great to start over all the time - wipe out all your mistakes, your disappointments, your failures. On the other hand, how frustrating, how shifting to see your best work wash away.

Art has waged this battle between change and permanence for a relatively short time. Before the 20th century, the world seemed to have a plan, or at least a rational system, behind it, and a painting or a book was created with some expectation that it would last. We don't believe that anymore. Many artists have become cynical, arch, self-referential, as if only what one personally feels or thinks could possibly have any relevance. They've lost their place in nature. They believe there is no reality worth showing if man-made or natural disasters roll so regularly through our times.

I think this explains, maybe only in part, the extreme popularity of TV crime shows, sci-fi movies, detective stories, thriller novels. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people still want shape, they want beginnings and endings, they want a battle between good and evil that ends with a satisfying bang, not an artistic whimper. It hardly matters who wins, as long as something happens, with consequences.

Nevertheless, we can capture beauty, no matter how fleeting. If there's no obvious plan, then at least we can express common goals and feelings. I find this lacking in art these days and have started to read back in the 19th century again. Oh, and of course, those detective stories that slip in and out of the mind so easily, whose morals rise and fall with such satisfying regularity.