Spring Sprang
What bliss to find a night such as last, the front porch our harbor against the sturm and drang! I alit there at 7:15 and savored a cigar, surrounded by books but unwilling to choose so I sat in sublime comfort and watched the trees grow and marveled at the beauty of the light and of the pure variety of planted things in our neighborhood, from griping pines with boughs hung low to sprightly Glendalough ferns and nubile cherries.
Neither the cigar nor my spirit flagged as I sat there for past an hour, just soaking in the splendour of summer and at this new thing that's arrived in my life, this new place to sit, this new place to ponder, this new place to ----
And then came the thunderous roar of a lawn tractor, some beastly hundred decibel maniacal noise that was three houses away but joined me on the porch. After that came our neighbor out with his gas-powered hedge clippers which also clipped my hearing faculties. I went inside briefly and got some ear plugs, and soon I was luxuriating in the fresh-tight prose of "Albion's Seed", lingering amid the foothillian footnotes and white, printless valleys sans twenty-five decibels. Or so it said on the earplug packaging.
History calms and soothes; newspapers lift our finger nails and pierce. I read with great delight of the early American settlers, of their fresh experiment about the 'city upon a hill'. The book itself is new and pristine as America herself then, with accompanying broad margins. My wife joined me and read Business Week and then a book about sled dogs in the Arctic. Soon natural light abated and our porch lamp sufficed; gorged on book and beauty, we went in to suck at the glass teat (watch TV) at a quarter past nine.
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