FECUNDITY

"I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle's loops and all. Every glistening egg is a memento mori."
—page 160, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The child and I wander down the Riverfront Trail. The cottonwood trees fill the air with a flurry of seeds that gives appearance of gentle snowfall. Nature is in bloom, the flora of the area ripe with reproductive fervor.

The child wants to make "snowballs" out of the piles of cottonwood seeds. We do. We throw them at each other.

We wander to the end of the trail and back, watching the river and birds—a cormorant as it flies upstream over the river, swallows in flight, robins, sparrows, goldfinches, towhees.

Cottonwood seeds stick in our hair. Cottonwood seeds stick to our mouth. Cottonwood seeds drift and float without a care.

And, we wander through this "spring snow," observing, resting, running, laughing.