A Walker in the Suburbs

There is no reason to associate crows with March, but for some reason I do. There is something in their caws that speaks of the mottled blue skies of this month, of the air that is still cold but smells of just turned earth.

Heard in a chorus, crows sound busily out of sorts, the avian equivalent of a coffee klatch. But heard in single caws, the bird sounds plaintive, his song a bleak and windswept tune.

Which is why, when I hear a crow on a cloudy March morning, I think of Thomas Hardy:

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
 

February is one of those months that is not improved by augmentation. In fact, one of its best attributes is its brevity.

So the fact that we have an extra day this month is less than welcome. Leap years mean you lose that lovely divisible-by-seven nature of March dates. It means things are odd instead of even. And, since February means winter and March means spring, it feels like we’re stuck another day in an outgrown season.

I’ve been thinking this morning of all the other months I’d like to see more of: May, for instance. Or  April, June, July, August, September or October. Any warm month.

But February, being low on days, is the perfect candidate to absorb another. So here’s a reluctant nod to a reluctant date. Happy Leap Year!

It’s been gray and rainy and I’ve been thinking about the beach. About the waves and the breeze and the elemental rhythms that flourish there. The sultry mornings and the afternoon thunderheads that pile up on the horizon and darken the skies.

Rain falls so heavily there that it floods the streets and sidewalk and beach, creates another world of detours and discoveries — the perfect excuse to stay inside and dream.

After the rain, the air is drenched clean, and the surf is stirred up enough to bring sand dollars to the surface. Reach down and find one, stamped from the ephemeral, the transient made tangible.

When the sun starts to set, the big show begins. This is the gulf coast, after all, and the afterglows set the western sky ablaze. Stand there long enough and it seems the sun will never leave, that it will hover on the horizon forever, perfectly in sync, perfectly in balance, perfectly in view.

I don’t know what prompted me to pick up the book Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall. I’ve read Hall before and liked him. The book was slender, could be read quickly. I like essays.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did. Hall is funny and wise and drops names only occasionally. But he is an honest chronicler of old age, of its limitations and indignities. The end of driving (two accidents), the end of his blue chair (he dropped a cigarette and the chair caught on fire), the end of mobility (being pushed through art galleries in a wheelchair) — all of these are related honestly, dryly, with no self-pity.

What remains for him is writing — and rewriting:

My early drafts are always wretched. At first a general verb like “move” is qualified by the adverb “quickly.” After sixty tries I come up with a particular, possibly witty verb and drop the adverb. Originally I wrote “poetry suddenly left me,” which after twelve drafts became “poetry abandoned me.”

Someone in his ninth decade who loves revising — that’s encouraging.