Pushing Spring

If I were to decorate the winter trees, arms gangly gray in a crooked freeze, with leaves of mint sugar and paper mache flowers, how long do you think it would take? I would need ladders and pulleys and twining to tie and large canopies, for the birds that went by would dive bomb my leaves and drag off my flowers for perfect sized, bright colored nests. I would need moon drops for sleeping and hammocks for reading and backpacks for keeping supplies (such as cookies of lemon and afternoon tea). My eyes would need sunshades in white. If I started five years ago, I'd still be working even if every elephant from every circus quit their careers to help me to tie blossoms we'd still only finish a patch. I would be tired and burnt by the sun and the elephants would quit because 'it wasn't no fun'. Even though I'd pay them in peanuts and cheese. Trunk to tail they'd stomp off for home. I'd look back on tree limbs in color for miles and see all the flowers in wet, soppy piles for the rain would break through the low cloud cover and start on a job of her own. Defeated and gray in my mood like the trees I'd fall to my knees in the rainbow debris and close up my eyes, fall to sleep patiently. Mint sugar leaves on my lips. When I awoke, from just one night's earth turning I'd find that the spring's midnight oil had been burning. Tips of tree limbs with blooms near to exploding. In one night the world wakes up sweet. With all of this knowledge comes patience, endurance to wait for the earth and her natural occurrence. I'll save my mint sugar for julep this summer when the flowers give way to their thirst.