Springing Through the Path

I go out the door on a startlingly beautiful spring day for my morning walk down by the railroad tracks. It is especially beautiful since the week has been filled with hundreds of tornadoes roaring through the South at a breakneck speed. Arkansas lost fourteen people. I think about the devastated families as I walk gingerly down the steep hill to my usual walking path.

The air is permeated with the scent of late April honeysuckle. The sounds around me are the clumping of my tennis shoes, the NPR station playing over my earphones, and the birds twittering away. I see a robin on a fence rail, squirrels scampering on the path as if feeling their social time had been rudely interrupted by the presence of a human, and two white-tailed bunnies fleeing for safety. I feel the leaves and twigs from the recent storms crunching under my feet. Many flower gardens are in full bloom with the Iris colors of white, purple, and yellow. The sun shines with no impeding clouds for the day, and the temperature is fifty degrees. I believe this day might be the last perfect day for a while again since storms are forecast again for the weekend--perhaps the last until Oct. as I know a long, hot summer is literally just around the corner.

As I continue to grow older, I find as much delight in nature as Wordsworth did in the English countryside in the nineteenth century. In college I used to laugh to myself at the simple Romantic messages of his poems, the daffodils which he recounts while lying on his sofa recalling them, the "splendor in the grass" and "glory in the flower" as he recalls his days as a young man in school, and the simple nature walks with his sister. Now, some forty-five years later, I understand him. He was far deeper than I could have imagined.