There is a cornfield at the corner of my road that you can read like a newspaper; it tells the story of the year in installments. It starts with the blank page of January laid out below black crow scribes, so pretentious with their portentous yawping, and it ends in the fullness of the harvest when the cornstalks bend and buckle with golden treasure.

For the past two months, the story has turned to romance with the male turkeys as the headliners. Every day, morning and night, indolent hens peck indifferently around their feet at insects and seed corn while toms take turns impersonating Tutankhamen, Louis XIV, and Liberace with extravagant poses, slow exaggerated strutting, and majestic furling and unfurling of their tail feather fans. It has to be disheartening for these posers. Despite all their exertions, it seems the gals only go gaga for grubs.

A man, sealed inside a daydream, sealed inside a car, sealed inside the asphalt, steel, and churning grit of the traffic cauldron at Church Hill Road and Exit 10, was tapped on the shoulder by Tinkerbell and invited to awaken to summer.

Well, actually it was closer to 10,000 Tinkerbells. I was the dreaming man sitting in traffic last week who snapped back to consciousness in a blizzard of floating, twirling fairies that had descended on the intersection in a breeze. These delicate, fanciful emissaries of nature had pierced the formidable layered defenses of that time and place effortlessly.

Lighter than air, they rose and fell in a westerly drift, giving form to the invisible breeze. These were the downy emanations of a cottonwood tree. But where was the tree?

On several subsequent trips through the intersection, I scanned the periphery looking for the source, finding it several days later bordering the parking lot of Newtown Cleaners a couple hundred yards up the road. Legions of cottonwood seed paratroopers swirled and drifted in the lot, while up in the branches, thousands more clustered in clouds awaiting the succession of June breezes that would carry them away to awakenings in every direction.