Green, green, everywhere

Green, green, everywhere.

I have a friend whose favorite color is green. This friend is also someone who appreciates hand-made gifts, so I have knit things for her from green wool -- socks, a scarf. I've made them from hand-dyed yarn whose depths of color add warmth to the sock and invite the eye into the twists and turns of lace in the scarf.

Green is on my mind because this week everything outside looks about 80 percent greener than it did last week, if that's possible in spring. We've had so much rain that living things seem sodden with new growth. Leaves on maples are flourishing. The tips of the branches on the evergreens in front of my house are bright with new needles. The grass in the parkway is green under the haze of dandelions going to seed. The blue-green of the lilac leaves shows off what's left of the clusters of tiny purple flower. Nature's riches turn out, turn over, float on the breeze. My living room window is so crowded with green that it seems less a color than a condition, like water to a fish.

I finished reading "The Overstory" last night, a novel with human characters that is crowded with the voices of trees. So it's not surprising my morning imagination peers into maples and looks for mystery. I listen for voices, but only recognize my own irrelevance.

I'm older than the trees around my house. In the time when I was a child this street was likely lined with elms, lost to disease. The maples that replaced them were flourishing but young when we moved into this house. How much they've grown is evidence of how long I've lived here. The corner maple has to lean out over the street to find its light and keep growing.

No moral here. No wisdom. Just this one life form,  me, in a beige sweater made of plant and animal fiber, contemplating others.