It never lasts. It can’t, and we might miss the magic were it everyday. But for a few weeks every year, Kansas City is a faerie garden. And then the fountains wake to sing of summer.

There are doubtless wonders I shall never see. But I have stepped from shelter into the open mouth of a hail storm, charged a gantlet of trees — some arrayed in white, red, and new green; some still bare — downhill to a ramp merging with an interstate aimed directly at an iridescent arch receding forever and forever as I drove, the spray flung up by all the traffic lit to fog by the setting sun while forked white spears trumbled the clouds massed overhead, in Kansas, days past Midspring.