For now, flowers are enough.

Though my tree continues to lay a fine film of itself over the ground below its branches, other trees in town--really notably, the un-weeping cherry trees, including the one whose branch I've run into all winter long--are still putting out first flowers. Trespassing is starting to tempt me. I've taken two flying drives out into the country to see what I can see, over the past few days, and I can imagine the day coming, swiftly on a hundred feet, when I'll want to get up the nerve to knock on a door and say, "Do you mind if I walk in your field?" I think of Annie Dillard, who mentions offhandedly in one book that she has done just such a thing: gone to her neighbors, said, I walk, I write, I'd like to walk your land. Tonight I felt funny enough ambling my car past the cows ruminating and reclining in the fields on either side of a zig-zag bend in the road. But I find myself wanting the time and the space for thoughts that are bigger, a plan and a project, a series of excursions to find the window-shapes on barns, the unexpected blade-shape on new field-growth, the unfathomably large eyes of livestock, and I'm not quite bold enough to try it without permission.