CMP Review 2024-03-14

March 14, 2024

“There will be another snow,” my son solemnly warned, even as I waxed on about red-winged blackbirds and other signs of spring. I had my doubts but I held my peace. Perhaps my son, like the flowers and birds, knew better than I what the season still had in store.

Sure enough the next week as we set foot on the nature trail it was covered with a dusting of snow. “You were right,” I said. But still I faintly heard the metallic ring of my red-winged friends.

“To interrupt His Yellow Plan,” Emily Dickinson reminds us, ”The Sun does not allow.”

And even when the Snow
Heaves Balls of Specks, like Vicious Boy
Directly In His Eye —
Does not so much as turn His Head
Busy with Majesty —
’Tis His to stimulate the Earth —

Though path and branches were dusted with snow, my eye still spotted a bud. The first buds of spring. The vicious balls of snow could not stop the sun’s work.

“The teacher too is a person in need of mental food,” wrote Elsie Kitching, “and it is as the teacher shares a common banquet of living food with the child that … dominating personality on the teacher’s part, and of inanition on the part of the child, cease to exist.” Perhaps this is no more evident in nature study, when buds and verse stir parent and child alike. And who could not then paint?

@artmiddlekauff