***

My class was over and art had begun. The students gathered art materials and found open places to work around the classroom; I sat at my desk and graded vocabulary quizzes. Then Nick sneezed. Once. Twice. “Bless you,” I said. “Thanks,” he said. And I returned to grading only to realize, a moment or two later, that the roof of my mouth itched.

***

The best time to look for them now is either early in the morning or late in the day, when the sun’s longest light settles on the branches of the trees. Where so recently it had only smooth bark to gloss, the light now finds the sweetest ornaments of color: chartreuse and amber, pale pink and white. What must you be made of to so catch the light like that? To take the light and diffuse it this way, to harness it for your own glowing use? When all you have to show for yourself, on any close inspection at all, is the translucent membrane of a blossom, the curled and tender launching of a leaf?

***

The hyacinths are up now, and I stop whenever I can, wherever I see them. I inhale them in the grocery store, in Duke Gardens, at the edge of the Trinity School parking lot where pink ones share a mailbox garden with some pansies. The ones I planted in my own yard have been reluctant arrivals; that part of the yard gets mostly northern light and, for a long time, I’ve had only the long leaves above ground with, between them, just the crown of the hyacinth blossom itself. But today, when I got home, the purple hyacinths had, at long last, emerged and opened. They are leaning a little to the right, heavy with what? That marvelous fragrance, perhaps. And I knelt and I smelled them, right there on my very own front walk.

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