This post was supposed to be my reward for work accomplished. “If I get it done,” I told myself, “then I will post that Something to my blog.”
But I don’t have the work done. Despite Serious Time with my notes before me, despite re-reading whole chapters and large sections of di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (a text with which, O Reader, you are now somewhat familiar being, as you are, an avid reader of this blog and having read, as you have, a list of vocabulary words from that book and Also an extract such that you are familiar with the exquisite talent possessed by that book’s author and which I Have Not Got), I am as yet Unable to come up with a thesis for my upcoming paper.
This makes me Uncomfortable.
And yet, here I am, posting.
Why?
Because the truth is that I Will come up with a thesis. Yes, I will. And I will write the paper. And this paper, as have so many before it, will be a thing of the past, folded into a great repository of Things Accomplished.
But the thing I wanted to post about? Well.
I was driving almost due west at 6:38 this evening, heading toward church and the Bible study for which I was late, and the sun was just flooding directly into my eyes. Oh, the annoyance.
So I pulled the visor down.
And then I could see them, lit up, electric: the translucent leaves, young and trembling here in the middle of spring. They were absolutely alive with light, cast because of it in the palest green, and pale, too, because they are so new. But that wasn’t enough: the sun shot all around their edges, tracing their newborn borders with burnished gold.
I was driving down 40 with ecstatic eyes, forcing my gaze to the road and away from the green display on both sides. The leaves weren’t like this on Sunday morning, were they? Surely I would have seen it then. Who could miss it? And who would imagine that something so soft and green would emerge with such quiet force from the dun-colored sticks we call branches?
The paper, I trust, will come, by thought or will, by force or prayer.
But these leaves. Some secret and magnificent propulsion squeezed them into the light, and there they were, in place for the coming months, holding firmly to their branches in modest pleasure at being small evidence of Life.
I just had to talk about it.
