I’m glad it rained today.

There’s this streetlight off the corner of my house, and on my midnight beagle walk I noticed the light it threw onto our maple tree. Lots of rain today left droplets all over the leaves, tiny leaves, bunched in clusters just unfolding. They sparkled all over the tree. I stepped outside again just now to see them again before the sun evaporates their shine. Right now this maple that’s older than my deceased grandparents is dotted in green that’s more baby’s breath than leaf, but in a few weeks those leaves will dwarf my daughter’s hand, and the moment will have passed.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been attuned to impermanence. It bestows value. I’d turn down the Tuck family water, I’ll pass on San Junipero, and more than the diet would dissuade me from vampirism. Of all the things I’ve watched and read, an A.E. Housman poem captures impermanence best. The last stanza is the motto I’m focused on here, but I figure if you’ve read this far, you’re probably down for skimming a twelve-line poem.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

The speaker is twenty, the same age at which I first encountered this poem in Late Victorian Lit. There’s a passage in the Bible someplace (a person with better scriptural knowledge could tell you where) that offers seventy as mankind’s allotted lifespan. The speaker calculates that he will live through fifty more springs.

Housman’s perspective is so antithetical to how we reckon time. We’re always counting up and waiting to pass chronological milestones, starting when we’re kids and want to get our ears pierced or drive or buy beer. If we later dread birthday milestones, it’s because we don’t want to go bald or imagined a different career by now or don’t want to be alone at 35. We focus on how much sand has run through the hourglass. Barring a terminal diagnosis, we younger people never notice how much sand is left in the top. There’s always been sand there, un unknown quantity large enough to take for granted, so instead we look down to calculate what has drained.

Housman looks up, and he sees the cherry blossoms. His speaker is a young man but knows springs are not infinite. Not for him. Not for me.

Using the poem’s figures, I too had fifty more springs at first reading; now I have 33. If you’re of a more statistical bent, life expectancy in the U.S. suggests I’m likely to get 41. Either way, the magic number is shrinking.

So I made my dogs stand still, and then shortly after I returned to the empty sidewalk to see the maple revive in the raindrops. My daughter picked a dandelion yesterday, golden fuzz petals and milky stem. The previous homeowner’s irises are rising now; I’ll get to see them bloom for the twelfth time. A robin perched outside my window today and tried to shake its feathers dry.

I try to live these spring moments to witness them and their beauty, to remember what and where I am, and to feel a little of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” People have written worse descriptions of God, and we get so few glimpses.