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Here in Guelph it is perhaps the most beautiful day of the spring so far. My garden is bursting with flax, chamomile, ink blue speedwell, and bellflowers. I walked down the street to the Eramosa River this morning to watch leaves float on the lazy water like toast crumbs on golden honey. Power and light thundered through the trees. Warblers and robins sang in the canopy. Two Canada geese watched silently from a secluded inlet on the far bank. I strained my eyes around their feet and spotted two goslings bumbling through the grass on the bank. They were chartreuse, budding green like everything else in their simmering, fragrant world. An early dragonfly darted about; at a distance I could see no outline of its body, just flickers of reflected sky light like lightning across the dark bank of trees, seething in the wind. Burgeoning lifeEverywhere, everything hungers, feeds, produces, grows. Cells go through meiosis and mitosis. Purple phlox bloom across gashes of sunlight in the woods. Life is making more of itself.In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, author Annie Dillard noted that people are vaguely-sometimes intensely--disturbed by fecundity, particularly in the animal kingdom. Most of us are at least mildly repulsed by fish eggs until we acquire a taste for caviar. A scum of mosquito larvae, a styrofoam carton of wriggling worms, centipedes and ground beetles scurrying from the light when we lift a log; all these things give us goose bumps and, at the same time, fascinate us. "I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls," Dillard wrote. "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." Living waterFurther along the river bank I found a wide ditch where one of the city's storm sewers drains into the stream. This warm, shallow water seethed with thousands upon thousands of tadpoles, each black head no bigger than the nail of my baby finger (As a child I believed pollywogs were baby frogs and tadpoles were toads, as if any normal person could tell the difference).They looked so alien, dark and grotesque compared to the glistening, jewel-sided leopard frog who jumped past my sandaled feet. Yet pride gleamed from the gold
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