And as far as cruelty goes, I think T.S. Eliot was being a bit overly dramatic when he suggested that these 30 greening days in the fourth month of the year were the cruelest. I can think of many other months that offer far more by way of cruelty.
Perhaps as a Midwesterner transplanted to England, Eliot never had the opportunity to walk deep into a northern forest in the first days of March—snows slowly pulling their tongues back into the earth’s mouth—to see winterkill huddled beneath hemlock boughs: the carcasses of deer withered on January’s barren fruit; the corpses of porcupines who weren’t fast enough to evade the brutal teeth of fisher; or even the rare bear who trudged too soon from slumber and found nothing but the empty taste of ashes in its belly.
By April, at least here in central Pennsylvania, the entire ridge-side is burgundy with the tiny blossoms of sugar and red maples. The coltsfoot has already discarded its yellow-fringed flower, and May apple is unfurling the glossy umbrella that will hide its fruit in June and July.
Dave Bonta (bio) crowd-sources his problems by following his gut, which he shares with 100 trillion of his closest microbial friends — a close-knit, symbiotic community comprising several thousand species of bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. In a similarly collaborative fashion, all of Dave’s writing is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. For attribution in printed material, his name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact him for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
Lovely. I want to walk in those woods.
The ones here are so different.