I've always thought it was most unfair for Adam and Eve to be expelled from the Garden surely God set them up with the typical temptation of the serpent and the sweetness of apple flesh or pomegranate or whatever it was Eve shared with Adam if God were so perfect why couldn't he have passed that on to man and woman? but maybe that was the plan to give him choice and the power to do and get it right and make mistakes too to let him be proud and humble too to sin and to exceed common greed or lowly motives of fear and self-forgetfulness in feats of extraordinarly strength and speed grace enough for love and other circuses nevertheless we find ourselves flawed and fallen postlapsarian for crimes beyond the Flood and therefore having sinned before Noah we are ante antediluvian always making slips of the tongue lapsus and lapsuso backsliders every one

In the past couple of weeks, a few philosophical daredevils have shaken off the shivers of Winter and defied the more timid maples to awake from their ever so slightly Humean sceptical slumbers. When maple and birch are still showing broom like stiffness against the iodine sky, the magnolia is secretly planning its morning advance. And barely has it shed the skin of its buds when other early arrivals take a chance on the weather, actively self-forgetting like Nietzschean aphorists, the treasure they found gleefully in the morning that they had hid the night before. I am referring to the daffy dills, of course, the fried eggs of a Dionysian breakfast. Not forgetting the tulips, which Dutch Princess Juliana keeps giving our city, long after she was Queen, proving that a rested bulb can last forever, especially when chastened by a bouffant. Some dos never get old, as we see from the more traditional bouffant, before and after, then and now. A surprising number of years...