On this national deadline day, a few thoughts on reaching goals. How what keeps us going is setting new ones, and what happens when we don’t know what the next new one should be.
The natural world may be of some help here. It’s all about growth and change: bud to flower, flower to leaf. Waves rolling in; waves rolling out. The steady rhythm of the tides.
But all of this within seasonal cycles.
Nature doesn’t mind repeating itself. But it does so with endless variation.
It’s the most suburban of neighborhoods, a place of happy families and dogs and swim team cheeriness. It’s tidy and cultivated.
Except every spring when the Bradford pears bloom. Then it’s magical. The natural world has taken over and I hardly notice the vans with sports stickers.
The white trees, the way they bend over the road. Their lacy branches and dark trunks. The ethereal effect of it all.
Spring reminds us of what is invisible the rest of the year.
What happens when you jump from winter to summer overnight? When you move from a few brave daffodils and halfhearted forsythia to flowering cherries and Bradford pears; to hyacinth, forget-me-not, periwinkle and violets — and, most especially, to budding maples and poplars and oaks.
What happens is perhaps summed up in one word, actually one sound. Awwwwwww choo!
Once or twice in this blog I’ve written about our late, great parakeet, Hermes. He was a talkative little guy who had a dozen or so words in his repertoire. But the sound he made most often was the human sneeze. He heard it enough that he figured it was our call.
There’s a reason for that.
The magazine I edit is stored in the second (deepest) level of the parking garage under the building next door. Ferrying our shipment of magazines from truck to cage involves a handcart that slides under the pallet so it can be lifted and pushed to its destination.
But when its destination is down two steep ramps and there are more magazines than usual, it’s a wild ride.
“This weighs 1,200 pounds,” said the driver when he surveyed the scene. “You want me to push it down that ramp?”
“Yes,” I nodded, adding something vague about how there must be more boxes this time, the delivery is usually no problem.
The driver used the side of the ramp to slow the momentum, but there was still a point when I thought we might have a runaway pallet on our hands. “This is like a ride at King’s Dominion,” the driver said.
The boxes eventually reached their destination, but it would take another guy and another handcart to finish the job. Along the way I moved some pallets and boxes myself.
Woke up this morning with aching arms and back. What gives? I thought at first. Oh, that’s right, it was yesterday’s delivery. It was a wild ride.
Photo: bestcardboardboxes.com
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands along the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide
Now, of my threescore years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A.E. Housman
I kept thinking of these words yesterday, of how beauty is bounded by time, how all things precious are. And so this seasonal ritual is not just spectacle, not just renewal, it is reminder.
The blossoms are fleeting; they, like us, will come and go. But we’re here, and they’re here.
There’s nothing left to do but seize the day.
I used to wait for the perfect photograph, hold my camera steady until a split-second unobstructed view. But on today’s early morning stroll around the Tidal Basin, I didn’t mind including people in the picture. It was the people I noticed most.
The joy on their faces, not a sour look in the bunch. These are cherry blossom devotees, early risers, up before 6 to be downtown before 7. Joggers, bikers, picnickers, photographers — all here for one reason, to get their fill of beauty.
Here’s what they saw:
Spring rode in on the tail of the southwest wind. And it rode in at full speed.
Whitecaps danced on the Potomac, and greening willows swayed in the breeze.
Cyclists on the Four Mile Run Trail (one of whom was me) felt like they were on stationary bikes, so strong were the headwinds they faced. They pedaled hard but barely moved forward. A strange and unnerving sensation. Exhausting, too.
The Four Mile Trail winds through Gravelley Point Park, which lies along the approach to National Airport. Which means that when I looked up from my torturous ride, I saw this.
If I was having so much trouble steering my bike, though, how difficult was it for the pilots to land? Hmmm. Maybe not such a good day to be at Gravelly Point Park. And so I pedaled away as quickly as I could. Which wasn’t very quickly.
I have a complicated relationship with mulch.
When we first moved here 24 years ago, I saw in mulch all the suburban ills — the false tidiness, the compulsive behavior of gardeners who seemed to have nothing better to do than spread the stuff halfway up their tree trunks.
These were days of high complaint for me. I missed the small New England village we’d just left. A place where houses sat right on the side of small lanes — and mulching, when it did occur, was done discretely out back.
Flash forward almost a quarter of a century. The small town idyll mourned and missed but ultimately abandoned. And the years that passed have not been kind to our yard. It’s obvious we have used no lawn service, no chemicals, either — unless you count lime.
Mulch covers a multitude of sins. Also, of course, it keeps weeds at bay.
Now I walk past yards aromatic with the stuff, gardens darkened with the best, shredded kind. And I wish not for a mulch-free yard, just the opposite. I wish for a yard already mulched. For mulch that doesn’t lie in bags in the driveway, for mulch that’s already been spread.
Lo, how the mighty have fallen.
The rain that was supposed to come today arrived last night instead. We have sunshine and fuller air and only a faint breeze stirring the holly.
Winter has hung on longer than usual this year, and any warmth is welcome. I remind myself what it will feel like in August, the blanket of humidity that will descend upon us then, how even a half-mile stroll will be a walk through wet cement.
Doesn’t matter. I crave warmth anyway. At this point I’m an animal emerging from hibernation, shaking my coat, searching for a rock to bask upon.
I discovered them last year and have imagined them many times since. Not exactly Wordsworth’s daffodils, but close. They have the same careless profusion, the same grace and glee. They come to a world stripped of color; they are the opening salvo of spring.
Even knowing they were there, I was still surprised by their number and color, by the way they’ve threaded themselves through the woods.
And I wasn’t the only one. There were other walkers on the path, nodding, pointing, savoring their glory.
I almost took another picture. But I’d taken several last year. So this year’s pilgrimage was just to look, to imagine, to store them up like sunshine and good times. To keep them in mind as the poet did, for a “vacant” or “pensive mood.”
And that’s where they are now, and where they’ll stay.