Groundhogs

I don’t know why, but possibly out of restlessness, I strike out after midnight tonight and I see the blooms of the dogwood tree gleaming in the light of the sodium halide street lamp. It is February still, but Spring is already coming to this town. Outside of my house, the singular daffodil is starting its bloom as well, and the smell of burning wood has subsided on this end of the street. Soon there will be weeding to be done. Our hands could be turned bright green before we could even snap our sweaty fingers.
My car, during this early warming, has lost one of its front lights. In high school we used to call it popeye, and upon seeing one you either had to kiss or punch the person you were with. Amongst dudes it usually was a punch; amongst mixed company, the kiss was more popular. I spent the better part of one Spring evening sitting on a stone wall when I was 18 with a woman kissing at the sight of every popeye. One would have thought that every car in town had one headlight extinguished by the passion that we felt for each other that night. Later she would ask me to her prom and I would weasel out. Then she would become a nurse in Minnesota. She would marry and have a child. She would live near the headwaters of the Mississippi. She would see it fed by the meltwaters of spring. I doubt she ever thinks about me, or these things now.
I guess this time of the year brings hope to my heart. Hope springs eternal, or rather, in Spring, hope is eternal. Maybe I am too hopeful. Forever the romantic. It seems like the stars are slowly coming back into alignment. It seems that the world might just slow down to that pace that I can understand. Tomorrow I think I will spend an hour walking around this city, letting my feet get to know it like they never have. They will feel the promise of pollen, pollution and circumstance.
But tonight… oh tonight, I wish I were in cold and windy Chicago, at the Horseshoe or Bierstube with JT. We spent the hour or two talking, or rather me talking, and it would have been better over a beer together, in that city where they truly appreciate the change of the seasons. Where Spring means something so much more. Where it means the snow will melt. The world will turn green. The Mississippi will fill its banks again, and the world, and you and I, stretched out over this great country, will be one again.