First of Spring
Sunday, March 29th, 2009
After a final snow, the sun broke and spread spring freely through the neighborhoods, the farm fields and the slummy parking lots. Filled with puddles of melting snow and bodies misshapen from months of eating indoors and no exercise, the lazy people were stretching on the walks from their cars to the grocery store’s sliding doors, the chill gone from the air and the briskness gone from their walks. Contentment is easy to find on a day like this, sunny and in the 40s, the wind light and with a chill layered in it, but not as threatening as February’s brutality. The sinster feeling fled on the carrying clouds.
Old women pass through crosswalks in Sunday bests, sweater vests and plaid pants, hands clinging to purses, minds intent on finding bargains and eyes for nothing else. Their men trail behind them in sport coats and loose-fitting beige pants, they too fresh from church pews and stiffled coughs and those snide grins that are passed between couples when the preacher touches on an issue that permeates their homes – a lack of genuiness between them and general despair and dissatisfaction. If the weather were warmer, the men would be working in their yards, maybe raking the first leaves of spring – the last of fall – or mowing patterns into lush grass catered to with poison and constant watering. These men’s lawns look good when the rest of the world’s are burned in mid-July. In March, the color hasn’t yet begin to show, but soon everyone’s lawn will be spring first-green and in their hearts they will despise the men on the same streets who put little into their yards for a similar return.
Car doors swing open and the drivers try to edge between the rows of narrow parking spaces, contorting bodies and sliding wet feet against the platic that line the floorboards. Shopping carts wheeled out from the store are full and in fact overflow on Sundays. Families come to complete their shopping for the week, a plan in place for meals from one Sunday to the next. Only a few leave with no cart, only carrying a bag or two and a milk jug. And they pass lonely with their heads down, maybe not the most joyous in the crowd or, if they were, diguising it with inadvertent perfection.
Above the flat gray square and the rooftoops, a small-engine planes passes north to south and the low rumbling fills the lot. Then more shopping carts give violent metallic shakes as they come down from the entryway onto the pavement and shrilly sound off but distant, too, like a coming spring storm. Car engines turn over and back from spaces and just as surely as they leave, more cars come to replace them.
Cautiously passing through the traffic are stock boys who round up the carts from stalls and the millipede wheels travel unesily over the rutted ground and the natural rises in the asphalt. And the boys come out again to take more carts inside, their orange reflectrive vests protecting them from customers behind the wheel. On this bright day, they mix in with the sunlight drenching the broad scene, becoming almost invisible. They are not safe today, no matter how gentle the weather, for even the most attentive driver or pedestrian might forget anyone else is alive on such a glorious day, the first of spring.
