Even as the cherry trees reach full blow, they are also visibly fading. Slowly, constantly, inexorably, petals drift down from the laden branches, collecting on sidewalks and road and grass--an etude framed in rose, time dressed in its church clothes. The fete is brief, just a day or two, and it is insanely beautiful.

Now, in morning's dim and watery light, I look up at the vase on my mantle--four blossoms: a creamy tulip, a coral tulip, two buttery narcissi. Perhaps I am uncommonly affected by flowers, but again and again they overwhelm me. Their exquisiteness is also a sharp and sensuous poignancy--so frail, so tough, so fleeting, so eloquent . . . the brevity of perfection--color and shape and drape and curl and scent. And I love them also because they are, for me, entirely voluptuous. I don't eat them; I don't transform them into salves and tinctures. All I do is look at them and smell them and stroke them and gather them. They offer me nothing but pleasure.

I was thinking about this in class yesterday . . . that acknowledging our deep and sensuous affections, whether for homeland or child or lover or book or flower, is exactly what gives us both the strength and the material to defy the machinations of evil. During my Thursday night writing group, a friend shared a memory of her now-grown son--a brief image of how the tiny child would grasp her thumb to stay upright--and somehow that solid, physical, sensory recollection sent a shiver over the entire gathering . . . yes, this, exactly this, this is what our bodies long to hear.