spring
On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 5.
For gardeners, this is the season of lists and callow hopefulness; hundreds of thousands of bewitched readers are poring over their catalogues, making lists for their seed and plant orders, and dreaming their dreams.
“A Romp in the Catalogues,” March 1, 1958 in Onward and Upward in the Garden (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 3.
They heard and felt the breath of spring, and they stirred with new life and hope. There was a good, new smell in the air, a smell of earth waking after its long sleep.
The Trumpet of the Swan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 9.
I love baseball. I live for the spring. It gets me through half of the year, and then I have to figure out how to make it through the other half. There’s a real poetry to baseball. It’s like life, because for a long period of time absolutely nothing happens. And then all of a sudden, “A triple play, unassisted!”
“Emmylou Harris,” interviewed by Lucinda Williams, BOMB magazine, Issue 59, Spring 1997.
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
Great Expectations (New York: Vintage, 2012), 403.
No matter what changes take place in the world, or in me, nothing ever seems to disturb the face of spring.
“A Report in Spring,” in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 15.
You can never hold back spring.
“You Can Never Hold Back Spring” (written with his wife, Kathleen Brennan) Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (ANTI-, 2006).
…and because the light will enlarge your days, your dreams at night will be as strange as the jars of octopus you saw once in a fisherman’s boat under the summer moon…
“Late Spring,” in A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Bracy & Company), 27.