The brown, unpleasant, aggressively ribbed and unpliant leaves of the loquat, shaped like bark canoes that something squashed flat, litter the spring cement. A fat-cheeked whim of air— a French vent or some similar affair— with enough choices in the front yard for a blossomy puff worthy of Fragonard, instead expends its single breath beneath one leathery leaf of loquat which flops over and again lies flat. Spring is frivolous like that.