"Nature's First Green is Gold..."

Well, it's happened. Enough tender, brand new green graced the trees that, when I looked out over the landscape yesterday evening, it seemed to shimmer with pale green and gold. And I knew the day had come to recite Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

It's my yearly tradition. I think I have done this just about every year since I first memorized the poem in the 10th grade. I don't think of the poem too often at other times of the year, and I try not to say it until I look out of a window or glance around me as I'm walking and get hit with that shimmering, golden sense of settled spring. Or at least as "settled" as a season can ever be in this flaming-with-beauty-but-oh-so-fallen-world we live in.

Yesterday was the shimmering day when the poem popped into my mind and heart. We were in the car on the way home from eating dinner and picking up a little bakery cake for our anniversary celebration. "Oh!" I suddenly exclaimed. "The trees! Nature's first green is gold..." D. immediately turned down the radio and told the sweet girl, "It's time for Mommy to recite her spring poem!" And so I did.

And it's still April, which is National Poetry Month!