Springtime in Colorado

I’ve been thinking a lot about Wordsworth recently.

Oh, there is blessing in this gentle air…

…he wrote at the beginning of The Prelude, the introduction to his “epic poem” that he called The Excursion. 

When I was in graduate school, I almost died of terminal syncope reading The Prelude, but now that I’m older and crankier, I find that things I studied in school are coming back to me. Somehow, in spite of my determined resistance  to that  sort of flatulent romanticism, in spite of my materialism, my exposure to Wordsworth has come home to roost.

Oh, there is blessing in this gentle air!

And there is. The first time I noticed it this season was a few weeks ago when the warm days were warring with blizzards and other evidences of what one Denver television weathermen (a damn boobie) called “Challenging Meteorological Events.”

But that afternoon, sitting out under the gazebo (which we pronounce “gaze-boe” in a nod to a female shark trial lawyer friend who grew up in the south), I felt “gentle breezes,” and the just made me happy.

Today, a month later, it’s even warmer, and this evening I spent some time in the front of our house walking up and down the sidewalk and watching the light fade and smelling the air that’s a combination of the usual Colorado goodness along with Iris pollen and flowering trees and things that make me take antihisamines so that I can enjoy the vegetation while hallucinating.

But there is blessing in the air. I’m so glad and so grateful to be alive and to experience this most wonderful of seasonal change. The newly green trees obscuring the view of the mountains to the west remind me of another poet’s image of the “whinnying green horses walking warm onto the fields of praise.” All of this green and all of these perfumes in the air. It don’t get much better than this.

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