The Trash of Spring

Winter offers pitting salty sand clouds after ice and gray-black fender-snot once white snow beauty fades. Autumn yields its gutter-clotting damp half-rotted clumps of elm and oak. Summer thrusts its crop of empty soda cans and water bottles spiced with hotdog butt-ends and withered fried potatoes. The trash of spring is joyful trash. Though eyes may weep and noses run, the live oak pollen decorates the windshields with canary yellow faerie dust. Though they mark your lawn for shame among your Calvinistic neighbors, what delights like delicate spheres of ripened dandelions? Even dowdy cousin milkweed spreads its gentle yellow emissaries of the sun across untended vacant lots and the stuffed brown degradable paper bags of rain-plumped clippings scent the Sunday air.