Sketches: part five

this post is the fifth in a series of responses to a child's notebook found at the Edmonton Reuse Centre

It's feeling pretty springy these days - every day I step outside in the morning, I feel a little bit brighter. It's amazing what a change in weather can do to your mood, or at least to mine. Still, I'm experiencing the same thing I do most springs in Edmonton - the feeling of dissonance between the signs of spring I see in the shops and those I see in the streets. Spring in my neighbourhood doesn't look like this sunny sketch. It doesn't look like the picture books full of budding blooms and green sprouts. Despite the warmth and the bright skies, there's a dismal quality to the slushy streets, and slogging through them. Here's a poem written yesterday, on my way home.

Cut Flowers

Lay her i’ the earth:

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring!

from Hamlet

There’s a dead squirrel in my alley this morning.

It lays there –

stoic

on a sheet of ice.

Coming home in the afternoon, I see it again.

Soggy.

This is what spring looks like –

wet and bedraggled

and even more dead than the winter it ends.