Entry 7: Opening

2 April 2017, early afternoon
Mid-fifties, partly sunny, slight breeze

With the ground still damp and grass glossed by dew, I return to Nannette's bench in Mellon Park, where I find the daffodils spanning up towards my feet. Since I was last here, they've quadrupled, if not more, their range on the west-facing slope. Some shoots droop wilted tips, while others look as if they'd just poked through the wet earth that morning. Pale yellow and bright yellow flowers glow against the blue sky half-smeared by clouds. Patches of hollow-stemmed chives fill the gaps between shoots of daffodils; I pinch of a blade and let the sharp smell take me back to childhood summers picking and chopping chives from the yard for dinner of baked potatoes.

A songbird behind me chips out his song, persistent and forceful like someone blowing too hard on a whistle. I crane my neck but can't ketch a glimpse of him; his voice hops along the still-bare branches of the trees. The trees downslope, however, have popped out white buds of flowers like blots and dabs on a painting, and I wish I had brought my tree guide to identify the budding trees.

The sun blares out from behind a cloud and I squint, alternating open eyes as I scribble words onto the page. Today the sky seems bigger, the horizon less crowded by low overcast, and I relish in it, that taste of an endless horizon. Why today? I wonder. The city's canopy remains bare, thousands of branches crisscrossing and layering to a tattered hem of horizon, and there have been blue, open skies before. Maybe, I think, it's an internal projection of landscape. Try as I might I find my internal and external topographies meddling and crossing each other, gray skies shadowing my mind, stress pulling wind hard against my face. It's hardly a one-way street; if anything, there are multiple lanes and wailing horns.

Everyone seems to be out today—runners, bikers, people walking dogs, children screeching across the park. This morning, running in Frick Park, I sprinted down a grassy slope, feeling with every pump of my legs that childish joy of playing outside, of racing among green carpets and letting loose any inhibitions. A fly dive bombs my forehead and circles my legs before buzzing off. I can hear the ground clicking again, the shift of air and water and earthworms settling and expanding into warmer weather. I shake my head to make sure it isn't just water seeped into my inner ear from this morning's shower. Clumps of minerals and bowls of water in your ear, it turns out, sound just the same as ones in the shifting earth. Inner landscapes and outer ones are sometimes indistinguishable.

A white butterfly lifts and dips among the daffodils and chives. Twice I brush off a caddisfly-like insect hell-bent on climbing up my calf. This afternoon feels like the world is exhaling, the canopied city sighing, breathing out that old intake of winter's air and false hopes and suggestions of spring. Everything is opening—earth and insect wings, blossoms and birds' beaks, my own mind and eyes, one at a time. I fear false springs, but today I cling to open sky and budding flowers, the burst of green on the park's lawn, the influx of insects keen on my body. Rain will fall again, and wind rustle warmth from my fingers, but at least the season is opening, the daffodils creeping their claims with confidence up the slope.

A breeze lifts up through the blooming trees and daffodils, filling my own open lungs with the scent of petalled promise. And I breathe out, a little, my own winter of doubts.