You look but you do not see

A couple weeks ago the trees were bare spindly branches scratching wildly in the wind, their trunks dark with rain and melting snow. They were silent. The birds chirped and sang with the rising of a red-gold sun that barely warmed the chill breezes. It seems but a few days ago that I noticed buds on the slender branches, studding the brown and gray with indeterminate color. When I looked out from my windows I saw the golden forsythia waving from slender whip-like branches thrusting up out of the dusty and anemic ground, but I didn't see what was happening right in front of me. I was wrapped up in work and family problems and everything else. I didn't really see my corner of the world until this morning until the sunlight stabbed my eyelids and forced me to stumble out of bed for another day of seemingly endless work.

As I squinted in against the harsh glare a hint of pink swam into view, pink cradled in deep verdant green like a forest in shadow. Light pink, dark pink, radiant pink against a backdrop of yellow green feathering the topmost branches of the trees, and a multitude of buds bursting open as I stared open-mouthed waking up for the first time in two weeks. When had spring arrived? I waited for it, prayed for it, coaxed it with warmth breath on the forsythia, that sun-bright harbinger of returning life. It was here and from the breathless warmth that barely whispers through the open windows of my bedroom at night, summer is not far behind, reminding me that the clock is ticking, the sun moving closer in its celestial dance, just as it will move farther away and bring with it darkness and cold and the snowy sleep of winter, passing quicker and quicker every year. Passing so quickly sometimes that, if we are not careful, we will look and not see the moments that burst like pink buds from the dark green cup of what were once buds.