With Warmth Comes Tornadoes.

Spring Fever. The mind awakens from hibernation and in a dizzy-frenzy tries catch up to the color and noise that blooms indiscriminately before it. Life. Like Dorothy in Oz when suddenly everything is in Technicolor. How she must have felt to go back to the black & white after skipping down that yellow brick road, elbows crooked with strangers in masks, facing color like a head out an open window.

They don't talk about that part. Its all happy endings with Auntie Em. Sure she's glad to be home at first- safe, warm, asleep in her own bed. Naivety lost, but the sweetness of innocence intact. But that all melts into the gray.

My spring-self is feeling rather like Kansas after the return trip. Black & white swarming into my awake-but-gray matter. How un-Spring. I don't see any fever there. This is no lovely way to burn.

Or is it?

There is still art to be had in the unexpected, in the black & white. I put a roll of black & white film in my camera on accident and found that a pack of Koi arching the surface of an algae-toned pond look better that way once captured in still. Spring has turned into a roll of the wrong film, but beauty has a mind of its own and can always find a way out.


I got wrapped up in Spring Fever. The blush of warmth; the sneak peek of soft, sweet pink buds crept in like the first glass of wine of a night sure to end well. Window shopping eyes filled with the reflection of big brushes of bright fashion life swept up off the floor of designer palates. How they rushed into my wickedly fit to be tied wardrobe and begged to spring forth into the temperate city life. I wore the same green sweater in what felt like a Beatles lyric - eight days a week. It seemed my restlessness found solace in these shallow purchases.

Alas, like the weather itself, it did not find roots, and back to Kansas I could feel myself shrink beneath my gray coat as the city swept under a cold front- again. A frown as frigid as the northern wind that cruised with such casual cruelty over me. Spring, a temerarious season at best, not unlike myself. It seems my need for the vernal -- measured fittingly by its duality holding all and no authority as I stumble blindly into greenness -- never-minding my original desire for true heat.

Heat. I'm looking for heat. Dorothy may have ended up in Oz on accident, but she made the best of it. I maybe in the midst of a black & white Spring, but Summer beckons, and after Spring Fever comes Summer Fling.