The Warmth of the Sun

I don't want to go all Al Gore on your asses or anything, but I do believe there is something to this whole global warming theory. It's mid-April for the love of sweet screaming Jesus. You've labored through the long hard winter with the diligence of a pilgrim. You've paid your income taxes before the deadline and set the clocks ahead weekends before. You've earned your bountiful beds of perennial bulbs, yet outside of that flamboyant and greedy forsythia (the plants that put the whore in horticulture), we've seen few earnest indications of spring. It breaks my heart to see the odd magnolia trees on the street dividers on Broadway emit their blooms like great pink torches to an audience dampened by ambivalent weather. The magnolia deserves a tableau that showcases its worthiness...and this is not it. It's not as if I can pick up the phone and call Mayor Bloomberg to complain. This is Mother Nature's mishegas. And that bitch always sends me into voicemail.

I talk about the weather a lot..too much, if the truth be known. I grew up in California and with a nod to that old cliche, I am a creature of the sun. I revel in hot days when you feel as languid and lazy as the sun as it lolls in the sky's hammock late on a summer's day. I love the broad exaggerated expanse of a blue sky as it coats the horizon as far as the eye can see. I love the finger painted streaks of clouds that play out on this passive background. These elements move with the ease of a cat situating itself from a the footstool to a small shaft of light on the carpet that comes in from the window. Languidly, with ease and flirtation. It draws you in and bades you restore yourself in its lure. It's an innocent hedonism that draws me...and why I long for it so greatly. It smells of ocean and chlorine; of fresh dirt and citrus leaves; of smoky charcoal and musky geranium; clothesline laundry and perspiration and freshly mowed grass.

While wishing won't miraculously restore a picturebook spring back to us (indeed with global temperature changes, there are more serious things to ponder for the planet and future generations as a whole), the eventual evolution to a hot summer day is within sight...and I am reaching for it.