優美英語美文:Taste the Wind
Taste the Wind
and savor the sweetness of spring
By Terry Miller Shannon from Reader’s Digest
There’s a word for this rainy winter day. That word is sullen. It describes the lead-gray sky pressing down upon us. It describes the fire smoldering in the hearth, mysteriously seeming to suck every bit of warmth out of the bleak, dank room.
But most of all it describes my spirit. I stare longingly out the window at the frost-wilted princess tree, and at the bare brown flower beds. Not so very long ago I was outside in the sunshine, inhaling the fragrance of rosemary and lavender, and picking a nosegay of penstemon and anemone. My mind remembers it, but my heart has forgotten it.
The rank smell of rotting garbage yanks me rudely into the kitchen. A milk carton, heaped with browning banana peels, onionskins and broccoli ends, reproaches me.
Last summer, the one I’m struggling to recall, my husband built me my heart’s desire: a compost bin. I delighted in my daily trip down the hill to dump the refuse on the pile.
But that was then, this is now. Now the wind slashes rain against the windows. I shiver. I don’t want to go out. But one thing is plain (and I may embroider it on a sampler): the compost pile waits for no woman.
Reluctantly I gear up in a hooded rainproof coat and heavy black boots. Snatching the milk carton, I shut the door behind me, a little harder than necessary.
The wet slaps my face like the tail of a fish. It steals my breath. I gasp and pull my hood so low over my eyes that I can barely see, and slip and stumble down the driveway. My garbage spills, and I crouch, buffeted by the lashing storm.
And there, not two feet from me, is a yellow crocus, and behind it, a purple one, each satin tube swelling and preparing to open. Deep, deep within me I feel a similar softening. I glance up to see an iridescent-green hummingbird hunkered down a fir branch, sheltered against the tree’s trunk. He doesn’t seem as surprised to see me as I am to see him.
I fling my waste on the compost pile. On the way back up the hill, I taste the sweetness of the sharp, sodden wind.
Tender green daffodil leaves poke through the grass, some even showing yellow buds. The blossom of one azure dwarf iris reflects the summer sky present only in my imagination. A maroon-and-orange salamander stalks across my path—a miniature dinosaur on a mission.
Back at the front door, I stop with the cold doorknob clutched in my even colder fist. Why go in? I certainly couldn’t get any wetter.
So I slosh through the yard, leaning against the wind and discovering more joys: a witch hazel sporting pale-yellow pompom-like blossoms, with a brisk citrusy scent. Dark-eyed juncos feasting at the suet cake. The tiniest unfurling of pale green at the tips of the alder trees’ branches. One lone azalea blooming brilliant red against the gray.
A jay scolds me shrilly from high within the wildly whipping branches of a cedar. “What are you looking at?” he seems to ask. “What’s there to see?”
This is what I see, I tell him silently. I see winter on the wane, slowly counting down to spring. I see that I will, someday, kneel again in my flower bed with a shawl of sunshine upon my shoulders and the scent of rosemary so sharp I taste it. I see sprouting, crawling, flying life, undeterred by weather.
But mostly what I see is that there’s glory to be found even in a sullen winter’s day.
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