Danish spring

I'm writing to you from farm country in Jutland, Denmark. I'm visiting my brother and sister-in-law for a few days. I've come just in time for spring. It arrived late this year, and then managed to all scramble on stage in one week. The trees have thrown on their costumes of leaves and flowers, the tulips are parading like princes and princesses and the daffodils, are already past their prime. I love the look of the leaves when they are brand new like this, bright enthusiastic green and still soft. The remind me of romaine lettuce that is slightly wilted, like when it's been in your sandwich since morning, so that when you drag it across your finger, it sticks like plastic wrap. Some years I would look at the trees and shrubs and feel like eating them.

When I first lived here I found the winter so excruciating. I and no appreciation for fall and spring because they seemed too closely associated with winter. I was only happy in high summer, and that was so short, so short. Gradually, as I became acclimated, I started to appreciate the spring. I realized that it is partly the dearth of winter that gives the spring so much drama. I could feel the change in my own body, as if sap were rising, blossoms were budding. As if "the fource that through the green fuse drives the flower" were coursing through my veins, were driving my red blood. I gradually tuned in to the rhythm of nature, the order that the flowers would appear in, the poigniant, fleeting, aching beauty of it.

Being here now is not the same, because I haven't suffered through the winter. But, despite all the beauty around me, which I write about here, there are also aspects of the city environment in which I live that are, well, ugly, and that is a dearth of its own, an aesthetic winter (in which, to tell the truth, just like the winter here, there is also beauty to be found if one looks) from which I have come to this spring.