Not on this warm April afternoon. It’s the kind of day you might call glorious: all blue sky and abundant sunshine. I’m walking along a tree-lined trail that serpentines along a creek and through neighborhoods, connecting park to park, point A to point B—a trail designed for walkers, runners, bikers, families, couples, kids on skateboards, kids and their parents on bicycles, wearing protective helmets as their mothers insisted. A place for vibrant young couples and the elderly who use canes and walkers to help them along. A place for people with dogs on leashes.
But today I am alone; no cyclists or runners close in from behind. No children laughing and shouting in the distance.
I’m surrounded by evidence of the emerging spring: tender nubs of pale leaves unfurling on bare branches; flitting robins and cardinals, performing their courtship dances; nattering squirrels, nature’s trapeze artists, scurrying along lichen-splotched trees and branches and across power lines, chasing each other through the transforming undergrowth.
And there on the sidewalk before me lies a single candy cane, sealed in cellophane. It is unbroken, pristine, as though ready to slip into a child’s stocking on Christmas Eve. It is small, no longer than my index finger. The kind you buy in packs of twelve at the dollar store.
Why is it here, on this sidewalk, this time of year? On a day when redbud trees labor with heavy purple blooms and dogwood branches erupt with swollen, emergent pale flowers that soon will burst into brilliant white blossoms like constellations against a brown and green universe of hickories, elms, maples, catalpas, mulberries, and sycamores?
Easter has barely passed. If candy must appear along this path, why wouldn’t it be a discarded jellybean or marshmallow Peep? Or if not candy, maybe a boiled egg, dyed in the pastel colors of the season and smelling of sulfur?
Easter, the celebration Christ’s death and burial and resurrection, is in my thoughts. Not Christmas, the Nativity and Baby Jesus and caroling. But then I saw this candy cane, and now Christmas has insinuated itself into my thoughts.
And ye shall find the cane Wrapped in cellophane, Lying on a sidewalk.
Andrew Careaga 