As Kingfishers Catch Fire

We are undergoing the long resentful adolescence of spring. The Sun is psyched, it wants to take the car and go. It hasn't grown the part of its brain that can foresee disaster, and so every morning--most, anyway--we get up and have to fight the argument that all we need is shorts and sandals, and we calmly explain to Sun that it's a good idea it just wouldn't work in practice, for maybe a while yet. How long? Sun wants to know. We'll tell you when.

Cold is still making the rules for at least another month. In the morning Sun bursts into the room with a joy and enthusiasm that I'm not really man enough to accept at face value. My ideal version of me would remove the cheapass slat blinds from the east-facing windows in the bedroom, do Sun Salutes to the dawn, oxygen-crazed light streaming through my closed lids. When the kids leave. The magnolia is ready to burst into bloom. It is as boisterous, as insanely excessive and as disarmingly vulgar in its innocence as my teenage daughters. And the blossoms are waxy, fleshy, tropical things. A bit of a freeze and they go all corpsewhitebrown. Nature's apparent lack of a viable plan is shocking. I think of Clinton's hopeful, goofy phrase from his second inaugural address: "Forcing the Spring." I must remember that because I was genuinely moved. Serious, it's cold today.

Beauty has to catch me off guard like a toddler bursting into the love lair or often I can't quite see it. I need it to arrive chubby, grotesque, dangly, pied, wizened, flat-faced, broke. Downstairs my daughters are making crepes and blasting The Proclaimers, who are playing this unworkable Chicago blues thing with total commitment. I want to hate it but they (The Proclaimers) are from Auchtermuchty, Fife, Scotland, and the council area of Fife is located between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, and Auchtermuchty translates as "Field of Boars." These are my people.

For a couple days I have been resisting the sun. I'm blue, I have a cold or it has me. And I think the reason I've been staying inside for the most part is that everything else in the world is participating in spring. Or it isn't even as civic minded as that makes it sound. It's not like everything in nature is giving 110% for the team, or putting on a brave face or holding up some other social virtue. Here's how Hopkins says it:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:
Selves -- goes itself: myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

And then the next bit is about how the likeness of God exalts humanity above nature, about how we express not just ourselves but Christ. But I don't even need that much. I just want to be a proper kingfisher.