<<< Aug 18, 2003 >>>

In Somerville, meantime, it was springtime. In one sunny day, while no one was looking, fully grown grass had appeared all over the seven hills, shaggy patches of it suddenly occupying every lawn and traffic island. It was like some garish chlorophyll-colored trash that had been dumped on top of the town's more indigenous ground cover, which, around the time the last snow melted, reached its peak of richness and variety. As always, there were black leaves, cigarette butts, and dog logs. But on any block-long stretch of parking strip even the casual hiker could also expect to spot fabric-softener squares; snow-emergency cinders; Christmas pine needles and tinsel; solo mittens; bluish glass dice from vandalized car windows; compacted flyers from Johnny's Foodmaster and the Assembly Square Mall; marvelously large wads of gum; non-returnable wine-cooler and premixed-cocktail bottles; sheets of gray ruled paper on which were copied crudely in pencil simple sentences containing backwards P's and h's; rotten Kleenexes resembling cottage cheese; rubber blades and choked filters; exhausted lighters; foody leakages from trash bags torn in transfer to garbage trucks, orange peels and tuna cans and ketchup-bottle lids set down on the ground by dwindling snowbanks; and maybe, if the hiker was lucky, some of Somerville's more singular specimens as well, such as the magnificent wall unit that for many months had been lying face down on an island in the Alewife Brook parkway, or the supply of Monopoly money that was spreading up side streets from its release point on College Avenue — yellow tens, blue fifties. This was the kind of congenial and ever-changing profusion of objects which Nature, "the great litterer," had once again trashed up with stunted weeds and plasticky-looking daffodils and finally, in a moment when people's backs were turned, a thousand cells of alien green grass. No foreign power could have been more sly and zealous than spring in its overnight infiltration of the city. The new plants stood out with a brazenness akin to that of the agent who, when his life is at stake, acts even more native than his native interrogators. — Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion, 1992

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