laptop confessional

It's a strange sort of calm that has descended, however temporarily, over the inner life these days. Like the suddenly blue skies (the flirting goddess of Springtime, leading us on) over the delicate haze of sprouting grass -- a reprieve, I suppose.

It's hard not to juxtapose the feeling with this morning's news. They found the body of that young man from St. Paul, missing in Ithaca, and it turns out he is the long-time family friend of one of my newer friends -- a classmate of her daughter's actually, and just a freshman himself. It's the sadly repetitive story -- a young person goes to a party, drinks, leaves alone late at night and never reaches home. They've turned up several students in the rivers around here in recent years, that way, and this young man was just today discovered in a pond on the campus at Ithaca. It's a terrible loss, of course -- loss is mostly terrible -- and this more senseless than violence, in a way.

Springtime, when people fall in love (or pretend to), when the long winter finally yields, though this year seems reluctant to advance in that way. We whine and complain, but I can recall several years ago -- maybe 4, and I have the photos to prove it -- when we had snowstorms with our green grass as late as May Day.