A tree forms itself

  Winter, Spring by Jim Harrison   Winter is black and beige down here from drought. Suddenly in March there’s a good rain and in a couple of weeks we are enveloped in green. Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks, cottonwoods, the bowers of thick willow bushes the warblers love for reasons of food or the branches, the tiny aphids they eat with relish.   Each year it is a surprise that the world can turn green again. It is the grandest surprise in life, the birds coming back from the south to my open arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.     Sabbaths IV (1999) by Wendell Berry   What a consolation it is, after the explanations and the predictions of…