First day of spring. Beyond this morning's gray skies and low ceiling, the sun is rising exactly in the east--I marked it on the neighbor's fence line one year during an especially beautiful sunrise and so today I know where due east is even though I can't see it. What I can see today is all of the junk that has blown into the road ditches during the long, long winter. Plastic cups from fast food places, aluminum cans, bottles, a piece of metal that looks like it once belonged to someone's car, a shoe. All of these things I expect. I don't expect to be walking along a deer trail through our ravine and find a large piece of discarded machinery, though obviously it has been there for quite some time and I just haven't been looking. A little way beyond it, I come upon an owl pellet under a tall oak tree. The pellet's charcoal-colored fuzz holds the bones of tiny birds and rodents eaten by the owl, all of them looking like they have been soaked in bleach--litter, but educational litter. I walk on but do not find any deer horns, though it is the time of the year when old horns are dropped and new ones begin to grow. It is spring: Time to clean up the road ditch before the bugs hatch and the poison ivy ignites, and time to leave some things well enough alone, like this work-weary machine--litter with a story I wish I knew.