(no subject)

A good mushroom found, and when you wander & feel like you're doing so at last, at last. The Spring. The Spring is finally so.

Mark it's entry & it's exit with the parade - it's good this year.

Noticing that the mantis' head is like the matador's hat, she bull-fights the chameleon while a parader operates its eyes. There's more besides. Drinking juices from the carved out pineapple, in the fashion of a king. That's up and a new-ish tradition. 3 years in a row but this is year 13 of consecutive attendance of the parade. We roll over pokemon gyms all during the long good walk in sunshine & overcast. Achievements blown out and given freely by apps & games - but we've been to the parade 13 times in a row without fail & there's just our own attendance as a prize. No badges or mementos. I'm trying to decipher a thought encoded into that realization. There's not one that comes easily.

In fact the sky is dense & the greenery has grown so thick, you'd mistake your latitude if it weren't for all the spare coats & gloves & hats still littering the house, needing to be put in their place, lacking for a place to be put, soon enough, after all, they'll be called upon once more. The house is small & dingy besides. But you don't need to consider it, not now, in the Spring-turning-Summer - there's the outside, and the porch & the long striding steps through the world that carry you.

You'll see the neighborhood's baby skunk. You'll see the billion chipmunks, you'll see the ant colonies overwhelming the dripped & dropped mass of icecream on the sidewalk - wars & uprisings, thousands mobilized and on every block. Vivified - that's the way of things. There's a thought - one I don't know how to decipher, one I can't turn into a real idea - but what if there was no winter, bleak & merciless? Would this - best week of all the weeks - would it vibrate like this in it's groove within the calendar? In it's spot?

There's a lot to catch up on. Old Father is dying, nearly. He's gone to the wheelchair & won't come out again. Soon he'll go to the bed & not come out again. He can't speak much or see a mirror without jumping in his skin, startled. He smiles though. Poor old man. They say his decline's been one of the fastest they've seen. None of us know how to face it. This is a year for death, you can tell that by looking - I anticipate that there'll be some more.

A coworker passes & another - a grandfather & soon another- it's getting to be pretty bleak, for all the liveliness.

It's proper to nurture cave-man dreams of cyclic growth & resumptions of the struggle, generational rebirths that you could -if you were inclined, fashion into the animus of a billion people, two billion. You could codify the end & the beginning and study the seam where they meet & not quite ever see that the seam's not there. A long perpetuity of descent & all the parts are inconsequential but for the consequence thoughts ascribe, but who thinks of us?

Morbidity & Vitality, it's all at once and maybe they're right about this town & how you'd never face the spring with the same goodwill if the winter weren't as vicious. Maybe.