Gold, Lasting

 T.S. ELIOT called April "the cruelest month" because it forces nature to awaken to the harsh reality of the world, after winter's long peaceful slumber. Robert Frost took another approach. Focusing on the transience of the first bloom of spring, the budding of tree leaves, he noted how rapidly the golden hue of a forest exploded into verdant leafy green. Nothing gold can last. Spring and fall are everyone's favorite seasons, maybe because we are consumed with birth and death, and their seemingly endless cycle, reminding us of our ultimate immortality. The spring of 2021 is unfolding more naturally slowly than any other in my sixty six years, fitting, as we struggle slowly to re emerge form our year long pandemic hibernation. I remember past springs which seemed to last a single day, a day of perfect weather lodged between cold winter and hot summer. With accelerating climate change, spring begins ever earlier, and recent spring seem to linger gladly longer, a gradual steady emergence from early March through April and into late May, when the heat arrives. Mid April and the redbuds in my yard and everywhere else have remained purple pink red for weeks. They needn't  hurry into green for me, nor, I suspect for anyone else. I love them just as they are. The maples are keeping their helicopter seeds as if reluctant to part with them, the tiny leaves reluctant to finally abandon early childhood and grow up. the tall purple which normally spring forth from the soil suddenly in early March are usually gone by April, replaced by dandelions. This year, the purple is still here in mid April, and the dandelions, unwilling to wait longer, have joined them. By now only the hardest of the hard core deniers still refuse to accept to obvious reality of climate change, and we know that future seasons will be far different from those present, for we already see them changing, hotter summers, milder winters, violent weather. We are beginning our efforts to reverse climate change to late to stop it. whether humanity ever deals effectively with climate change my generation will not live long enough to know. I am content, and must be content, to have lived long enough to dwell joyously in this perfect spring in the autumn of my life.