Growing up, every year on a certain day in Spring my mother would take us all outside and while pointing at the maple tree in front of the house she would recite,
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
--Robert Frost.
My other favorite Spring poem is
The Goose Girl
Spring rides no horses down the hill,
But comes on foot, a goose-girl still.
And all the loveliest things there be
Come simply, so it seems to me.
If ever I said, in grief or pride,
I tired of honest things, I lied:
And should be cursed forevermore
With Love in laces, like a whore,
And neighbours cold, and friends unsteady,
And Spring on horseback, like a lady.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
Perhaps for family night I will make the hubbs listen to poetry and examine the new leaves that seem to have appeared on the trees outside our windows overnight (he just loves it when I make him do things like that. Actually he hates it but as we've been watching basketball all night I figure he owes me)
Welcome Spring. We are so glad you could make it.
This is the view that greeted me from the back of the bathroom door today--remnants of our swimming expeditions last week.
Nothing Gold Can Stay for those that don't know, is a family tradition. I'm pretty sure that there isn't a person in the family who can't quote most of it.
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