while i was away

from 3.10

Stones and beeswax on a quite pretty table, all the hurts and haunts pressing. But there are plum blossoms blooming on my windowsill, and they, even, were pruned. They were cut off because they were not the Best For the Tree, and here they are blooming in a small blue cup with a little water. And the cup is broken, too, it’s an accidental vase. It still has its white patches without glaze where the handle fell off, but I just turned it around.

They bloomed while I was away. I left them greening and stretching, and I looked at them every day. I leaned over all my books and made sure they were not thirsty. It was even hard to see, because their little cup is blue, and you know so is water. But then I went away, and when I did not look at them they opened. So when I came back it was just a little thing, it was all theirs. It didn’t take my proud look for every each petal to be a miracle of spring.

But I rescued you, didn’t I? I picked you up and chose you so especially based on the size of your cup and the size of my windowsill and your perfect asymmetry I thought was most reverent but Not Too Proper. I quickly with sneaking smile copied nature, I brought awe inside and articulated it, didn’t I?

I wonder if I will notice each one wilting.

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.

Two winds, and March

Last night there were two winds, and we were like Janus, facing two directions. One came from winter, bitter and cold and driving. The other so intoxicatingly warm, gentle - almost humid. It was a May breeze, ahead of April and March all at once. We must have been on the edge of a front, though I felt on the edge of time itself.

It seems like a sneaking, tripping allowance, an indulgence. A great gasp of YES when weather and time stand firmly in two places at once. This is the truth of it, always, but to be so bold about it is startling and exciting. Oh yes, contradiction! To stand outside of the linear, to dwell in the great embracing paradox!

It stops the story, at any rate. The temptation to categorize and narrate, in order that we understand ourselves more exactly and logically. “It is winter, still, just below freezing but soon the buds will swell.” But here there are leaves on the shrubs, and there on the north side the ground is still covered in ice. My mother saw the redwing blackbirds, but jays still call like they own the place.

I suppose the greater trajectory is still linear, overall, and these patterns are reassuring (the fact that it’s all shifting to ‘sooner’ and ‘warmer’ is alarming, indeed). They provide the solid ground, the background landmarks by which we measure our progress. We locate ourselves through the temporal, meteorological myths and memories of our landscapes.

But ‘both at once’ is precious, and perhaps that’s the greatest gift of March, the infamously fickle month. It’s not fickle, though, it’s honest. It’s bitter and gentle and warm and wet and windy and freezing. There are snowbirds and robins and flowers and ice storms. And on walks with two winds I don’t feel so out of place, myself.

a new wind

There is a new wind tonight. She is born of mud and crack and thaw, on the heels of sunlit last snow. Usually she first whispers in March, but the sap is running now in early February and I’ve already heard someone say “snowdrops.” So, the bulbs and the buds and the wind have it.

Winter wind cracks and whips, it is more force than voice. It is hollow, sharp, and fierce. On a dark January night it catches us, snaps at us, and then leaves us staring at stark stars, everything sharpened. It does not linger in its work.

But the wind tonight was speaking, with chill enough to hone and brighten, but now with character. It is beginning to be laden, as now there are bits of the world to carry, opening. Soon galls and buds will release; the machinery is at work. The stew is stirring. It won’t be long now before skunk cabbage, those alien claws that seem to exhume themselves.

This year’s turning of seasons is dipped in unease, come too early and earned too easily. But tonight’s wind, and the moonlit river, and that first smell of grass can’t be written off. They speak too softly, are too lovely, and move us too deeply and deftly. We are grasped, gladly lured into another brimming turn.