Winter Garden

These last few days, as I walked about the Street, watching my feet, avoiding the bits of trash, squashed cigarette cartons, empty juice boxes, discarded one-shot liquor bottles, I found myself amazed at a delicate beauty newly arrived. As I stepped past the decaying disposable diaper box that has been three days now in front of the corner house, caught a blowing newspaper with my free hand, I looked down and thought -- perhaps incongruously, perhaps miraculously -- of winter gardens.

After these weeks and weeks of rain, drab sidewalks are now sparkling emerald green. Every gutter glows mossy green. Every hole next to every drain is suddenly cloaked forest green, and previously dull and dusty brick pathways now blush pink and lavender, happily nestled inside this sudden green. 

I know it won't last, but I'm enjoying it for now.

As every crack has filled with velvet moss, broken sidewalks transform to road maps of imagined realms, vibrant exuberant magical places. Wild rivers are marked out in green, some with islands and some with spreading deltas caving into invisible seas.

Sober crossroads are chopped and channeled,

 marking close distances that are still too far to see, jungles crashed to deserts, mountains reaching past a flattened grey-smoke into mica-star skies.

Who wouldn't want to pause momentarily, decide which path to take, maybe climb those mountains?

I stop, one foot on the crossroads, and watch my neighbor lift a cut tree from the top of his car, its limbs bond tight against its trunk. Another drapes ropes of entwined pine over and through his chain-link fence. Someone else has nailed a wreath of rosemary on their entry door. They are all following the tradition of bringing green when all outside fades to gray, but I wonder if they take the time to look down and discover this 'other' green -- this brighter, fresher, sudden green --  in gutters, on sidewalks, against fences, beneath their feet. 

I love winter wreaths alive with holly berries, but I want to dive into those mossy rivers of green.