Change is a tonic

The few times I have gone away from New England I have always ended up feeling parched and stagnant. We grow according to our topography, I think, and often underestimate its effects. This is not to say that we cannot adapt, and that certain landscapes cannot offer us an expected release, reprieve, or connection. My friend Erin grew up on a pear farm in California, and found the sage scrub-steppe of Colorado disconcerting at first, and then extraordinarily liberating. She then felt like she needed to take deeper breaths when she transplanted herself to the dense vegetation of western Washington state.

The grandeur of the Pacific Northwest was what I couldn’t take. The overwhelming lushness. Maybe that means I’ve taken the puritan aversion to self-indulgence too far, but there it is. Everything is bigger, taller, wider, rougher – more extreme. Take Acer macrophylum, the maple out there. ‘Macrophylum’ means “large leaf,” and they are, actually, bigger than your face. The trees themselves are often two hundred feet tall, all a-covered with draping moss. Western hemlocks tower over our eastern ones, and the shrub vegetation of the forest floor is dense and can grow to eight or more feet. Much of it is green all winter, and when you rise up over any old hill there’s the jagged, fourteen-thousand-plus foot peak of Rainier. There’s only so much gasping one can do.

It may seem odd that one could feel something like ‘parched’ in a region as notoriously wet and verdant as the Northwest. What I craved was the quick and magnificent turning and cycling of New England. The distinct and dramatic nature of our four (or more) seasons has become a circadian rhythm for me, and as years tick by I notice and begin to understand my own periods of dormancy and fruition. Change, these cycles of death and birth and death, a thousand times a day, are the stuff of life. I have finally recognized the great myth of the upward, linear climb, finally reaching an inert and stable plateau for the great illusion it is. It’s more a messy sine wave, I suppose. What I fear is not failure but stagnation (well, I’m sure I feel failure a bit, still).

All landscapes change, of course. The desert for some is as inspiring and evocative as any other place, and the Pacific Northwest squirms and roots and fruits and changes, too. But I’ve set my clock by New England, and the springing robins at dawn open something, always, in my chest. I’ve adhered my own weather to our own barometer, and now I need thunderstorms. And the sound of sap thumping the bottom of the bucket, the great humidity of summer, fireflies, a ponderous winter. I need rock walls to train my eyes through a naked deciduous forest, to see what’s bare and stark in myself. And then a floor of warmed pine needles to bring a languid rapture.

who speaks for spring?

“Spring is like a perhaps hand,” says e. e. cummings, whose poem of that title goes on to evoke an ethereal jack frost-of-the-spring, lightly and kindly undoing his work. A blush of rose here, a quiet hand quickening the willows to bright gold. The ‘veil of green,’ as my father put it, which appears when buds swell. This image is often used—the maiden of spring – as opposed to the bold, brazen, boisterous matron of summer and harvest. The one with wild hair and twinkling eyes, who produces tomatoes and pumpkins and corn and honey – all things outlandishly fertile. She is delicate spring, come of age and fruitful. Round and rowdy and overflowing.

Maybe it’s because I haven’t felt the abundance of summer in almost a full solar orbit – the feeling that every inch of space is not only alive but brimming – but it seems to me spring is as bright and daring and messy as anything else this year. Snowdrops appeared full and hearty, thrown suddenly amidst dead leaves and hummus. The grass has greened, unabashedly, overnight. There are grackles, blackbirds – the icterids are home. Daffodils don’t coyly lift their heads, blushing with attention, either. They do what they look like they should – they trumpet. The whole world is blaring, just like the crepuscular robins. But that’s for the next entry. Let us say for today that robins (some individuals of which do, in fact, overwinter, changing their diet from worms to berries) are cheerful, evocative, social, and extremely demanding of your attention come dusk. And soon, come four o’clock in the morning.

All this blaring and wild waving of blossoms and beaks makes me doubt the ‘maiden’ idea. It all seems twinklingly sneaky to me, but kind. Maybe spring is a coyote, but she’s wiser than that. The archetypal hag? Clarisa Pinkola Estes is an anthropologist and storyteller, who has championed the wise old woman. She lives in muck and dirt, the edge where things die, only to be transformed. A conjurer of bones, a seamstress of flesh.

There’s a touch of all forms in spring – that is the magic of the ‘edge’ of a season, where you can see all things in one. But when I see the alien purple tentacles of skunk cabbage reach out of the ooze, see the snowdrops bust out of leaves and mud – I hear bright laughter, and something that resembles a happy cackle.

the return

The world is white today, perfectly fitting for the first of March. One of our only true winter snowstorms, and it piles up on the lids of the sap buckets. The birds are in-between, too. They are trying on their breeding plumage, without fully committing. I notice it most in the goldfinches, whose dusty olive backs are getting yellower, whose bright white wing bars seem more striking and defined. I've seen one who almost has his black cap fastened. The cardinals' beaks are brighter, too, and the house finches' salmon-purple back patches show up like flashes against the snow. But it's still only the winter inhabitants I see - the warblers are a ways off.

Persephone will come back, soon. She and Demeter and Hecate have popped up around me lately, in reading and conversation, and it's got my mind on pomegranates. And as I write there is one male cardinal, all contrast and vitality.

I want to be baptized with pomegrates,

blood-red, of this world.

I want what is not purification,

But what will take me under -

An unction from inside cells and muscle.

I want to crush crisp rubies

on leathery skin,

Not the unknowing velvet of birth.

No, and the sticky red will stain

my gray hair.

It will trace wrinkles

and stick, stuck and unseemly.

If there are rotten gems they

Too, crush them too.

I want it all, faceted ovary -

And also I will be the one to do it.