What city dwellers are missing this time of year

April mornings are remarkable. The Robins are meeping or peeping or whatever it is they do. The sparrows and swallows are tweeting and twittering their songs. The blue jays are squawking and the occasional woodpecker drills. Below these melodies and accents, the mourning doves keep rhythm with their cooing.

In town the dogwood trees are finally blooming. They line the avenues with their pinks and mauves and “dusty-rose” pompoms. Their color breaks up all the green, which was a welcome break from the whites and grays of winter. The tulips and buttercups are standing tall, another accent against white houses and green lawns.

When it rains, we check our gages, pull weeds, and avoid stepping on earthworms. When it’s sunny, the hum of lawn mowers an lull nappers to sleep in the late afternoon. That doesn’t happen much though, gentle rains keep the earth muddy, so that the new lawns are almost overgrown, like deep shag carpets. Each day they’re darker than the day before. Rabbits and cats come out of hiding and explore the world that had been so inhospitable all winter.

In the country the last of the geese glide North, crossing flight paths with hawks, vultures and the occasional crane. Meadowlark calls reverberate off the rolling hills in a way that no digital surround sound stereo home theatre system could imitate.

Thanks to April showers, prairie grasses and the hay is coming in emerald as Ireland. One can finally make out a quilt of squares across the land. Green squares of hay and grass, tan corn stubble, gray soy stubble, and the deep, rich, dark brown of Iowa’s fertile earth where farmers still drag disks that plow it into rows.

The oaks are still bare, but budding. The ash trees have been leafy for a while and the cottonwoods are just uncurling their yellow-green leaves this week. They seem to just be waking up when you see them next to the spruces and firs that make up so many wind-breaks.

Crabapples present their pale blooms on the sides of the highways. Raccoons and coyotes criss-cross gravel roads, sneaking up from culvert to culvert. Testing the boundaries of the morning and evening, not content to rule the night.

Gangly young calves skip across the hillsides after their mothers who meander along sampling sweet new blades of grass, wet with dew.

I can’t help thinking about Grant Wood paintings with titles like “Spring turning,” and “Spring plowing” when I drive my daily commute through the countryside each morning. When I come home in the afternoon and see the older women working in their gardens, I remember William Carlos William’s poem:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

A walk around the block changes every day, whereas in California suburbs, tropical, temperate and lovely as the landscaping may be, each morning is like every other morning. My drive to work each morning changes every day and so does every drive home in the afternoon. The drive in the city was monotonous. Every drive was gray, every drive smelled like exhaust, not of dew or soil or manure or pollen or smoke, or rain, or sap, or dust- only exhaust. The only thing that may change for city drivers is the pace of the back-up, the news on the radio.

Every drive in the city is like winter, gray and white and brown, only warmer. Every day of spring in Iowa is a poem, a painting, a symphony, a work of art.