Spring will bring Byzantium

I got down on my knees this morning and examined a bit of ground near my house. Sure enough, the first tight tips of crocus buds have pushed up into the light and in a few weeks, these pioneers of the spring season will bloom.

Winter storms may still come, but they will go, too, and the seasons will change. My family members who have lost jobs in this ruined economy, will survive, with our arms of support wrapped around them. My grandmother, who fell and badly hurt herself this month, may yet have a few joyful years left with us.

I read through Gnosticism this winter and do not regret the time spent on it, though it was terribly hard to understand. Now I am reading the very last of the "pagans" before I enter the literature of the Byzantine Empire, prelude to the Middle Ages.

This weekend, I read Longus' "Daphnis and Chloe." After the Nag Hammadi library, this book seems almost unbearably simplistic.

More later.

Toes upon the grass

With spring's arrival and the warmth of the ground where concrete has not yet smothered it, comes an interesting dillema: to bare or not to bare?

I'm speaking of feet, not nudity.

I love going barefoot and I kick off my shoes the minute I step out of my car at the end of the day.

Of course, that means that I've stepped on a few nails and a bee or two, which earns me no sympathy from my shoe-bound relatives.

The advertising circulars at this time of year depict lovely women and handsome men in the latest pastels and snow white outfits; and sunshiney, wholesome children dressed so adorably that one just can't help but smile and believe that innocence can't be dead quite yet. Little princesses in prim, white shoes stand upon perfect grass that does not in the least look anything like the weedpatch around my house.

But are these Easter-adorned little people actually being repressed? Should their young feet be free in these giddy, mild days of spring, to scamper unshod upon the sod? Check out this website: www.unshod.org, for a group of people that certainly feels that way.

By the way, if shoes we grown-ups must wear in going about our daily drudgery, I lend my full support to anything open-toed, at least for the ladies. Wiggle your little piggies and let them enjoy the sunshine.

The pitch of spring

Walking past a small grove in the city today, I caught the fragrance of spring. Not tulips or lilac or some such prosaic thing. No, for me the smell of spring is pine resin.

The trees bathe in the newly potent sunshine and the unmistakable aroma carries me off to mountain trails and moments of leisure.

Ancient pine resin, I am told, is responsible for today's petrochemical industry -- everything from the juice in your ride to the plastic wrap for your lunch.

It's powerful stuff. Apparently, one species of pine, the Jeffrey Pine of California, has a slightly different -- and explosive -- chemical composition to its resin than its sisters in the needle-branch tribe. Turpentine makers out there kept having their factories blow up until they figured that out.