Vernal On Sunday

My calendar says it is the 15th day of the 3rd month of the 15th year of the 21st century, a specificity that should focus a mind to the present point.

My head says, is this Sunday? Possibly it is…

No real decisions are made but we find ourselves stalking the moorlands with a sharp wind and a shovel. 

We heft a small sack of horse poo half a mile or so, a circular route, back to the car. Unburdened then up Cox Tor, all the way to the panorama and the full push of wind. We hide for a while in the dip of a rock nest. Dog wags patiently.

We climb down over knolls of buried stone; matted in grass, it reminds me of sloth hair and giant knucklebones. Gargantuan knuckle dragging sloth monsters slumbering under our feet.

In every pool, ladles of frogspawn, rich bubbles of life. 

Even here, where the vegetation is dwarfed by harsh weathering, there is succulence in this waking season.
The sloths will be dreaming of warming sun.

We sit in the car, heater on; we are eating ice cream, rubbing Dog-steam from the windows to watch crow birds hop.

At home, time has flown.

Roast dinner cooks, getting ready to grease hungry lips.

We raise a bamboo arch for future beans.

Dog has gravy on her biscuits then sleeps, then wakes herself with dream twitches.
We laugh and we are so greedy today, we bake pudding.

The day seems plated up, a glut after winter.
Spring is here: we feel it, as though it were in our very blood, in each cell, renewed, this capacity for enrapture.