Blink of Eye

Sunlight strikes yard and garden this morning -- and what seems extraordinary, to the winter-accustomed mind, is not only that this run of gray and cloud-covered and drizzly days has ended but also that the snow-cover that seemed so lastingly permanent only days ago is gone. From the last sunlit day to this one seems a long, slow blinking of the eye -- with the landscape transforming while the eye's lashes were closing and obscuring the white-buried yard -- so that what is suddenly there, when the eye reopens this morning, is a mixture of the green and light browns of the areas of lawn around the garden plots, and the surprising, deep, wet darkness of the gardened areas -- that clayey loam we have been working at improving, these last few years.

The skeletons of the grape vines, so visible from the kitchen window before the eye blinked, nearly disappear in this color-laden flood of new visual information.