Before ten years ago, we never knew we had pin cherries. It was only after the pines began to fade from age and drought, that the little stand of trees took root. After we saw them we noticed the tall sinuous parent tree to the east, one we had remarked for its trunk shape but never knew by name.

The way they told us was their blossoms in the spring, shed in white flurries like a second snow when the wind came in over the lake from the south. Their deep copper bark contrasts beautifully with their early chartreuse foliage and that of the maples and juneberries nearby.

We should have known they were there, downhill from our vegetable garden, waiting in soil created from forest duff on top of sand left by glaciers, but we never saw them until the blossoms came.

Pin cherries like cold climates, grow like weeds and die early. They take no chances on reproduction, spreading both by birds who devour their berries and by sending roots beneath the soil to the next open spot of sun and rain they can pop up to meet.

Besides being more pit than pulp, they are related to roses, I found out. Also to juneberries, chokecherries, black cherries and raspberries, all of which grow wild in our untended woods.

Good travels, pin cherries. Find a niche, stick with it, make yourselves useful. Enjoy the company of others, all of us here for a little while.

It was darkness in springtime, with orange blossoms. The Spanish understood it, especially the Greek, the one who painted as if with his brush he were feeling the bones.

Seville turned silent as the procession passed, folds of Christ’s cloak carved in wood, black with age, moving through the smell of rosemary above the costalares straining beneath their floats, weightlifters shuffling in cells of night with the bugle dirge behind them, until a tap on the pavement told them to take one more step, to set down the load bearing on their necks through soaked towels, to rest.

It was raining bombs that spring on Belgrade, and fear on Kosovo. Albanian Kosovars lined up at the Albanian border and at Macedonia, all the borders they could get to, miles of them, to get away, to get anywhere away from the slaughter. They went toward hope, for without hope the darkness is too powerful, the darkness wins. They straggled into borders, miles of people, some of them partial, some whole, some angry, some gone already.

South of Seville in Ronda also there was rosemary, bitter and resinous in the evening, people holding a sprig next to their heart as the float passed, the float of Hermandad del Santisimo Cristo de la Sangre y Nuestra Senora del Mayor Dolor, the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Christ of the Blood and Our Lady of the Greatest Pain.

They were not thinking of Albanian blood when they carved into the signal bell of their float in Ronda the name of their brotherhood. They were not thinking of Kosovars when they wrote their names on the chart of lifting positions for the raising of their float at the signal of its bell. They were thinking of the blood of Christ, of the blue veil of the Virgin floating above them in the scented night, of the sound of shuffling feet in every Spanish town this Semana Santa, this Holy Week in the Year of our Lord 1999.

The Christ died doing what he loved, convincing people of possibility. Others who saw perfection differently took his life, as did the bull which gored Manolete of Cordoba. The people loved Manolete too, for his artistry in the ring, but he worked in a way different from the Christ of Nazareth’s way, until the end when they each drew the bull close.

His spirit, Manolete’s, is still inside the replica of his tomb in his home town, on the second floor of the bullfight museum in Cordoba. You can go there and see for yourself, white marble.

In the procession of Semana Santa the brotherhoods march as penitentes, robed and hooded, barefoot and chained, dragging behind them links of iron scraped bright on the pavement. Satin cloaks and hoods bear emblems of their order, sewn-on mandalas, designs hundreds of years old.

It is a matter of fasting the next day if you are a penitente. If you are a young one, your mother will feed you a sandwich just before midnight. It is important that the procession be done late in the evening, arriving at your neighborhood church about three in the morning, because in daylight the reflections are wrong. The floats and hoods and capes and chains are made to reflect the light of candles, not of the sun. People lining the procession route expect this. They are silent and serious through the week until on Easter morning everything changes and the processions take place against the whiteness of the orange blossoms, in the light of a new spring.

Perhaps this is how Manolete will arise one day. We will be in the procession straining under our load, shuffling toward the thump of the marshal’s staff on the pavement, setting down at last the wooden crossbeam from our shoulders to crouch, to rest. And then Manolete will appear at the end of the next block, his mother standing beside us wiping away her tears in the joy of his arising from the marble box on the second floor of the house in Cordoba, the beautiful marble box lifted above the street as we lift the Christ on our shoulders.

Then he, Manolete, will lead us to the border. It is there that we will care for the woman from Kosovo, for her child and for her neighbor, the one with vacant eyes, the one who has not spoken a word.