It’s not in open fields or in large gardens that I see spring arrive. It’s in the several scrawny trees of a small city square. There the greenness stands out like a special gift and is joyful like a warm sorrow.

I love these lonely squares, tucked between streets with little traffic, and themselves with just as little. They are useless clearings, always there waiting, in between forgotten tumults. They’re a bit of village in the city.

I come to a square, walk up one of the streets that runs into it, then back down the same street. Seen from the other direction, the square is different, but the same peace gilds with sudden nostalgia – the setting sun – the view I didn’t see when I walked up the street.

Everything is useless, and I feel it as such. All that I’ve lived I’ve forgotten, as if I’d only vaguely heard it. All that I’ll be reminds me of nothing, as if I’d lived and forgotten it.

A sunset of mild sorrow hovers all around me. Everything turns chilly, not because it’s colder, but because I’ve entered a narrow street and the square is gone.