The Green caldron - University Library

12
THE
Definition of Early Spring
Valerie Lawrence
Rhetoric 101, Theme 3
The Green Caldron
GRAY LEAVES OF THE SHATTERED WINTER STRODE
man-like with the wind down the wet pavement. They did not move
with the confidence of complete victory—rather as tired bleeding sol-
diers dragging themselves off the field. No one stopped them with annoyed
glances and rusted rakes : people give up too easily. Or, perhaps, people
don't feel comfortable in a cleanly-swept world.
The leaves continued their human step; touching the pavement heavily,
lifting one side, and thrusting themselves forward again: not without pain,
but cleanly. Fragile, they were not. But they were delicate in their way;
perhaps they had the sensitivity born of experience.
The sky was a soft gray, unruffled as the breast of a preened dove. Wet
streets were all, though ; no fresh drops fell. The leaves swished in swirling
eddies about the boys in corduroy slacks. With every step the boys took, the
slacks creaked like large-toothed saws drawn through a tall gray pine. The
leaves kept pace with the boys, stopped with them at the top of the hill, and
looked down. No car splashed past them, and they stood silently for a very
long time.
Below, where the dull highway slithered its winding path through the
fertile land, and again, across, where the gray pavement marched precisely
up the opposite hill, the soil stood black and ready. And the boys watched as
the red tractors appeared from their sheds suddenly, after-births of spring.
High up on that hill opposite them, where the wet highway turned suddenly
right and then continued its steady steep climb, a meadow sprawled. In it
white fingers of melting snow on blue-veined rocks waved a sad good-bye.
But there was no sun to hasten that hand's slow death.
The boys did not seem to notice : it was too cold for kite flying. Besides,
the scene held them with the singular fascination of a thing primeval; no
little lame balloon-man here—only a cold gray picture of something ancient
and half-forgotten.
Yet that feeling of eternity—of all ages in a moment—stretched forward,
too : there was expectancy mingled in its fibers. But there was no immediacy
in the expectancy, and the smudgy atmosphere of death did not envelop the
boys and leaves, but let them go.
Leaves do not stand forever poised on the top of a hill. Thus, the sound
of their strange tread did not startle, or even interest, the boys. Down the
highway the leaves tumbled until they lay very still in a puddle which glittered