PAUL CHRISTENSEN

I found three tiny crocus sprouts in the garden today. They were as innocent as a boy's first pubic hair, tentative and shy, but determined to flow with time toward some culmination. It has been a long winter, with the ice so wrinkling up the surface of the world, you would think it might die of old age. But here they were, these indestructible little green hairs worrying their way to the crumbly surface of the ground, under the matted, brown tangles of last summer's weeds. T

I once had a conversation with a man from Siberia who said he grew up in a sturdy hut out on the steppes where the temperatures in winter were sixty and seventy below zero. His family slept on top of the ceramic stove, which was shaped like an igloo. You had to wrap a jute hose around your waist and put the end into your mouth when you went out, or the air would burn the tissues of your lungs. We stood there in the warm Virginia sunshine as he told me this; he was still young