gateway to spring.

"I came among these hill, when like a roe, I bounded over the mountains, by the sides of deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led..."

I and cousin Marie thought to sled the long and winding hill, but how all of nature flung the door wide on a prosperous spring, that year! We had trout and fries at the roadside, live music, and cold, bottle beer.

We volunteered to pick up litter on the roadside, in honor of our church, and declined the Crick-honoring roadside sign that would hold us to an ongoing promise. According to the standards of some, it was our springtime, each of us, but we both thought it really wasn't, that our clocks had gotten into time pretty well, then.

In youth's idiocy, we could claim a self righteous justification, in the church of ego, falling asleep with the bottle, the peculiar late teenage methods of breastfeeding, irresponsible motorcars as if we were Wind In the Willows,  but no longer was the way, as it was some dozen years into our legal adulthood. Where we were able, we behaved badly, there were no nuts stored in our knotholes. And then we felt the sting of time on our persons, "How To Write A Blackwood Article".

"Nature to me was all in all. The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, the mountain, and the deep, gloomy wood, their colors and their forms, were then to me an appetite: a feeling and a love, that had no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied, or any interest unborrowed from the eye. {Such an age} is past, and all its aching joys are no more, and all its dizzy raptures."

"For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, not harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue."

Animals That Wear Clothes find not a need of self-emptying upon the hour of his hopes, for such shall have neither consumption, nor ownership, but a protracted bliss of alignment, and upon himself, instead of in a falsetto, the sauce of his freedom and the curse of the future: 

"...he turned to me and heard my words, then he brought me from the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set me feet upon a rock, gave me securing footing and established my going. Into my mouth was put a new song, praise unto God, in hope that many shall see and in awe, respect, trust, swear allegiance, and keep steadfast in the truth of the Lord..."