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Although it has not happened since 1913, and won't happen again till 2008, Easter can come as early as March 23, just barely inside the official limits of spring. But whether Holy Week falls in March or April makes little difference in Texas. It's always springtime here by then.

People like the dogwood to be in full bloom for Good Friday. They like to point out to one another how the dogwood's white blossom, shaped like an ivory Maltese cross, each point dented and tinged with red, is an emblem of Christ's crucifixion wounds. They even send one another greeting cards bearing the so-called Legend of the Dogwood, which links the tree with the wood used for the cross.

The dogwood trees are usually blooming at about the same time I teach college sophomores the Housman poem that begins,

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Most of my students have never seen cherry trees in bloom. The Texas weather is too mild and genial for the cherry's hearty nature, so I rely on the dogwood tree to furnish them with a reasonable facsimile of Housman's vision. The decorative dogwood chooses to display its white blossoms along the highways precisely when they will be the most conspicuous—before their own leaves unfurl and before the other, taller trees have put on their new leaves. Thus, the shadowy recesses of the winter-bare forests provide the perfect background for the white blossoms.

The only rival to the dogwood's ostentation during Holy Week is the redbud, also known as "the Judas tree." Most flowering trees bloom only from the tips of their twigs, but the redbud's small, purplish pink blossoms pop out all over its smooth, silvery skin, even directly from the branches and the trunk. A popular horticulturist calls the redbud "the colorful doll of our hardwood forests" and compares its flowers to "little dancing shoes."

People in this part of Texas consider a perfect Holy Week one in which the dogwood's dramatic appearance exactly overlaps the redbud's rouging of the Texas roadsides with its smudges of pink. And as if the native flowering trees weren't enough, bluebonnets smear across acres of pastureland like mosaics of lapis lazuli, punctuated by saffron Indian paintbrush.

They are very beautiful, these blossom-laden trees and fields of blowing flowers, heartbreakingly beautiful. And I have plenty of opportunity to have my heart broken as I drive twice a week to the university, 60 miles away. The little two-lane highway dips and twists over creeks and around farms that used to grow cotton but now are grazed by crossbred cattle.

Some of the descendants of the people who used to pick the cotton still live along this road or in the tiny towns of Shiro and Roan's Prairie. Their decrepit houses lean and gape at the surrounding woods and fields. They stay, the people who live in these hungry houses, because they are tied to the dogwood and redbud, just as surely as they were once tied to the cotton. Every spring they wait for the dogwood's appearing, and its glory, sudden and stunning, gets them through another year. So they stay on in their obliquely slanting houses, sustained by social security or ADC checks, rather than move to the city.

I suppose I'm one of the few people who actually like Lent. I like it in the same way I like throwing away last year's student essays and clearing out my file cabinets. During Lent some deep crack opens in my soul, down which I like to shovel the dirt and debris that has accumulated over the year. The sly self-deceptions, the dogged willfulness, the witless pain I've left in my wake that I've been too busy to notice or repair. From back in February, before the blooming starts, 40 days always looks like little enough time for this task. The penitential season is for clearing away accumulated garbage, and I usually set to work with a will.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44