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Damned right I’m persistent. For all those who read that and think, what, my husband ended his diary entry yesterday by saying, I was nothing if not persistent. He’s right about that.

I set out to find a spring poem to quote for the first day of spring, which was yesterday. I have seldom read a more depressing bunch of poems in my life. When you consider that I have a degree in literature, that says something. Oh, the poems started out okay, but before they ended, they were depressing. It’s almost as if they were embarrassed to be totally upbeat, as if that weren’t cool. Either they were afraid to be cheerful, or modern anti-depressents would have changed an entire generation of poetry. For good, or ill, I don’t know, but it would have been different. Everywhere I went one of the few bright spots was Wordsworth’s Daffodils, but it’s been over quoted. I thought that in college, when I had to do a paper on it. So I wanted something cheerful for spring that wasn’t by Wordsworth. I finally found it.

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

That bit of cheer is from A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. It is a book that I haven’t really looked at since college, when I spent a good part of a summer in the Michigan wilderness learning that I didn’t really want to be a wild life biologist. I’m far too fond of indoor plumbing, and other little luxuries of life. It’s just as well, if I had decided to pursue the biology as a career when my allergies hit just after college, I’d have been seeking a new job. I am unfortunately allergic to most animals, and most plant environment. Some field biologist I would have made. So it was good that summer that I discovered I like the outdoors, love animals, want to help save the environment, but not absolutely up close and personal.

I started bemoaning that I’d wasted two hours yesterday seeking a bit of spring gladness, but in all that searching, I found the book I just quoted. I remembered why I bought the collected verse of Rudyard Kipling. Read his poem IF, and you’ll either understand what I mean, or you won’t. I found my complete works of Robert Frost. I found my birding journal with quotes about birds in it. Such pretty pictures, such lovely quotes, I’ve never had the heart to actually use it as a journal. I think I had forgotten why I loved poetry. Getting a literature degree will spoil you for it, sometimes. Make you not want to read another piece of it. I think, at last, I can go back and enjoy the poems for their own sake, and for my enjoyment, without trying to discect them, and figure out what they mean. I always hated having to figure out what a poet, or an author, meant by something. Just read and enjoy. I know I certainly don’t want to be analyzed. The scariest so far on telling me what my books were about has got to be the woman who was a pure Freudian (I didn’t think they still existed). She went on about father figures and phallic fangs. EEK!

Got to go for now. Today, we are trying on clothes, seeing what shirt goes with which pants, or skirt. Deciding what we’ll be wearing where. Don’t wear the shorter skirts if you’re going to be on television. Don’t wear the higher heels if there’s going to be a lot of walking. That sort of thing.