Et in Arcadia ego

The park is partying green today, the trees throwing their hands up green, green heads bobbing to the music, exhaling deep green clouds of intoxication under a festival blue sky while we heavier, denser mortals lay on the grass as if it's a peaceful spring day, which it is.

"I keep staring at the dead tree," Katie says, pointing far across the lawn to a single spindly gray skeleton of a thing standing alone between two aggressively green trees.

"It looks like it could have some thin leaves coming in though, see the purple?" I say. But when we get there, we're able to see that it's very much dead, a corpse of a tree, stiff and tall, and the color was just a combination of the illusion of distance, the proximity of life, and too much optimism.