portland

portland in spring



it’s sunny today finally. the cherry blossoms are falling now and spring is marching. there are tulips everywhere I look. today I saw red ones, yellow, pink, white, then some that blended from one hue to the other. the dogwoods are in bloom too and so are the pears and plums. the backyard looks like a mobster funeral. at least that's what Mark calls it, all the white bursting and hiding the new green canopy beneath. it's strange when the clouds lift and the sun shines, everything looks bigger. it's as if the clouds are squashing down everything and making you feel down pressed. then as suddenly as anything the sun is out one day and the bike ride seems completely new. even though I trust the corners in a full speed lean on my bike, it feels like at any moment the lines I know so well in the contour of my commute might change and find me flying over the bars or into a tree. but I trust my senses and realize that the grey has only muted everything into a blur, but only for the sake of change and when it lifts, what I knew is still there -more clearly there.

to know the seasons is to experience time. in the tropics time does not run and so it is not fleeting. there are flowers all the time, green surrounds every house, and every dirt track and path. green is even in the skies in the form of squawking parrots. even the caterpillars feasting on the tomatoes in the backyard are of the brightest green, jade-like. to see the tropics is to see an endless summer, marked only by the rainy season juxtaposed to the dry.

but time in the seasons comes with more than just flowers. in the spring I feel bursting, full of revelry and intensity for action. summer brings in much of the same yet subdued, sometimes a little lazy in the afternoon heat. then fall with its new nudity starts to bring forth a melancholy mood, not unlike Dickenson’s presentiment. then winter arrives, with incessant rain, cold and dark four thirty, followed by the ever present low clouds, keeping I all down to the ground, stuck in this city which I love to hate in winter and loathe to leave in summer.