Here is another day; a ribbon of blue sky. Six doves pass above my office window. My neighbor's Japanese maple, adolescent in pink, lilacs only a mist of purple, forsythia waning.

A frost caught the newly leafing butterfly bushes and turned them to twisted, dead things. This morning as I cut red tulips and rather tattered daffodils for Sally's mother, who is in the hospital, Sally noted the bushes and said, "Well, they'll survive, but they'll probably be a bit bare where the frost got them, a little less lush than they usually are."

I feel that this is true of our little community now; one frost or another has seized all of us in surprising ways these last nine months. We lost a dear friend, (mother and wife) Nancy; two of us lost our jobs; we've dealt with sickness and uncertainty; another family mourns another dear friend, and now Sally's beloved mother is in the hospital. We're all a bit barer on the outside, stripped to vulnerability even in this wonderful spring.

I hope. I believe. I trust. Such overused words, and so hard to say with my soul. The trend in literature right now--fiction and poetry--is to hide these words, to replace them with perfectly wrought cleverness. Smart and clipped, sarcastic and a little bitter, apparently offhand but squeezed and skinned to a certain ugliness that leaves us all bereft. Sincerity is out. We have become so afraid of sentimentality (and we should abhor it) that we have lost the ability to bear goodness.

But sentimentality is word without flesh or joy or pain, without all that comes with being human: un-incarnated words. We pull it over us when we have lost our courage to articulate. I look for Believe in Nancy's garden, in her roses that have become lithe and green again, that remind me that death is not ending. I watch Sally drive off to see her mother yet again in the hospital, her car cluttered with tea cups and knitting and flowers, and I find Hope. I touch the faces of my children, watch them in sleep, and I see Trust. Words dwell in the bodies and blood of all I love; I collect them, I hold them, they are bird calls and color, they are new every morning.

Here is goodness: sitting on the floor next to Sally this morning, watching our children. Tulip leaves pearled with early morning rain. A hot cup of tea. Toast with jam. The love of a community, strong overlapping webs of meals and words and presence. All the things that current under us, that deepen us, that help us say the words that seem sentimental and facile to others. I hope; I believe; I trust. One hundred thanks that spill from my cup, even in a morning of frost. What was it that John, Nancy's husband, said to me as we stood broken over Nancy's grave? He looked at me with eyes struck through by pain. Behind him, tall-shouldered pines darkened in first nightfall. "We are waiting for the eternal spring," he told me. There were low mountains around us, the leaves of winter at our feet. We stood over the grave mound and the sound of Nancy's daughter's sobbing filled us. We are looking for eternal spring. Let it come. Let us see it.