Then I notice that there are stars underfoot as well. My feet strike stars in the damp sand. Everywhere I walk I am shod with light. Now it comes to me that these may be some light-emitting marine animals that I have read about, a family of protozoa called noctiluca. They are microorganisms, and although the sand gleams in my hand, they are not to be found or seen with the naked eye. What kind of “phenomenon” is this? At once a chemical reaction and a living thing? This illumination from mindless lives seems to me to have an incredible vitality. When I stamp brutally on the ground the prickly squares of light dim a little, but nothing I do can put them out or alter their abundance. The sea’s riches touch the shore and leave their fire. I may be in the presence of something that is nearly indecipherable, neither matter nor antimatter, neither the animate nor the inanimate, but a true representative of the sun, and more than the moon, a life in light. There are these night lights; and the lights of day, like the newly arrived tree swallows that shuttle across a stream dipping and diving in the air after insects. They have lovely white bellies, backs of a beetle’s iridescent green. Because there is still a tight residue of winter left in the air, the warm days when they come seem to promise everything. They come to us like a story to a child: “What happens next?” As I look through the novel glassy stillness outside the house I can hear the click of a bird’s bill as it chases a fly to the ground. It almost seems possible to see the grass growing. There is a rich salt smell coming from tidal marshes, a bolder light on their hummocks and stretches of oaten thatch. The sea breeze sounds, making the distance stretch with music in the light’s new allowance. In these opening stages, spring feels to me like a bird settling on the water, like a herring gull that drops down to the surface, spins a graceful half circle when it lands, adjusts its wings, and settles down to rest. Life begins to show easier, freer ways of action which it had almost forgotten in the cold and dark. It displays itself, like the soft red flowers that hang from the maple trees, or the mourning cloak butterfly, come out of hibernation, stretching its wings in the yellow sunlight of a path where I am walking.