When you trim your hair down to the roots for the first time, it grows back fresh, blunt, dark, and new. When winter blanketed New Haven with unprecedented volumes of snow, the surrounding plant life was snuffed out. Extinguished and washed away like a clean wax strip followed by an acid cleanse. Well, the land has thawed. Now, these ignorant blades are appearing throughout campus like an apocalypse of badly shaved hair. They’re patchy in their protuberance. Dainty reeds with naive spear-tips.
I see these baby growths and I think of the thick bundles of garlic-related plants purchased from the grocery store:garlic greens, chives, sprouting onions, scapes, scallion greens. They’re similar in form from afar. I feel guilty for mistaking spring blooms with things I should stir into my stew; I should be thinking of flowers. These daffodils, crocuses, lilies, irises…all reduced to sulfurous-smelling cooking grasses. Who’s to say these aren’t equally tasty? Who’s to say the gardener didn’t buy the wrong bulb? Beneath the new mulch, beneath the early April mud. We’re hungry for warmth, for spring. We may see it when we call the soil by soup. Who’s to say there isn’t an entire spring salad feast, waiting for someone to test empirically.
