April is the cruellest month

It’s a glaring dull and overcast Spring day and I think of that scene in the movie Blue Velvet when a mechanical looking robin hops onto to the windowsill carrying a worm in its mouth.

Morning, just another day. We were living in the Jamaica Hills neighborhood of Boston. Big houses and yards. Winter kept us warm.

Down on Centre Street we stopped at Goodwill to buy second hand Easter baskets. Counting out pennies. Soot and grit, this town could use a cleaning with a good stiff brush. We passed a middle aged band of panhandlers who were settled in front of CVS. A little girl pushed a tiny stroller through the traffic. Babies having babies.

Near our house was an old woods in the middle of the city where a path descended past boulders, wild grape vines, and two inch thick bittersweet slowly wrestling trees to the ground. At the bottom lay a stagnant black pond surrounded by mud. Some boys laughed and threw stones in the dirty water.

We stopped there and I said I thought this was going somewhere but this is the end.