On Friday I had a reason to be in Kansas City where (before returning home for the 5 PM class) I stopped for a few hours at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the site of my favorite badminton court.

The Kansas City Sculpture Park on the museum grounds contains (among other works) the obligatory Calder industrial sculpture, a pair of Rodins -- one bathing and the other "thinking," as they say in Missouri -- and thirteen of the bronze gobs by Henry Moore, who did things with bronze that it would be illegal to do with a bell pepper in all but a few counties in southern Missouri where they can't help themselves.

And of course, the sculpture park offers these towering shuttlecocks by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen that provide a comment about context and that help to mitigate the monolithic weight of the museum building. Three birdies rest on the side of the museum shown in the photos, and a fourth (not shown) perches as if just returned to earth, poised as it is on a feathery tip on the other side of the museum, suggesting that the museum is not a stone monolith but a webbed net.

Of course, nature (aided by some serious nitrogen) wasn't to be outdone by some mere shuttlecocks. Redbuds and tulips bloomed, and the vast lawn surrounding the museum had already reached a point between the bright green of a fresh, spring lawn and the darker green of a heavily watered, summer lawn.

Am I bored with spring yet? I think not. Am I resigned to its passing? Yeah, whatever. Spring and summer are wonderful but brief at these latitudes, and the years, whether marked from Christmas to Christmas, or from school term to school term, are paradoxically even shorter in this age.

Chalky, gray skies -- not the great, glowering gray skies that sometimes saturate the greens and purples of this season -- and cool temperatures prevailed until the drive home, when the Mighty Metro had to fight headwinds all the way along the westward trek on I-70. I drove directly from Kansas City to my five o'clock class, arriving just in time. In the meantime, the winds off the Rockies five hundred miles away had blown away the insulating cloud cover and had driven the temperature down to nearly freezing.

I enjoyed the trip to Kansas City immensely, and as usual resolved on parting to return more often to take in the sights and the bus fumes.

Yesterday I attended the second to last fellowship board meeting that I must chair. The annual meeting is next Sunday, so I can begin to pass the responsibilty and aggravation to Kathleen at the May meeting. After four years on the executive committee, the last two as chair, I look forward to enjoying the fellowship in a more relaxed role again.

Can a UU be permitted an exclamatory hallelujah or amen? Maybe even a hosanna or two?

Can't stop me.