Poison Idadee
When Suzanne was little and first encountered an itchy rash on her arm, she couldn’t quite say “poison ivy.” It came out “poison idadee.”
And “poison idadee” it has remained these many years.
I’ve been getting into some “poison idadee” myself lately — and I have the itchy arms and bottles of calamine lotion to prove it.
It’s not fun, but I’m glad that I’ve ventured off trails, explored new paths and hacked my way through brush and briar.
Summer will be over soon enough.
Tread Well
Yesterday’s walk began in the woods, late afternoon light slanting in through the canopy. Copper and I crossed Folkstone Drive, strolled down Treadwell, a street I love not just for its name (perfect for walkers) but also for its length and lack of traffic and for the calmness I feel when I’m on it.
Treadwell ends in a pipestem with houses tucked deep in the forest. Before you reach it, though, there’s a path back into the woods. We took it, picking our way through some sticker bushes and crossing a creek that required my first sitting down on the bank (a hesitation Copper didn’t understand) before launching myself forward to the other side.
Once across the tributary, we could wander from one trail to another. I noticed the silence, interrupted only by the caws of a crow and the hum of a distant airplane. Was it the silence that freed my mind to appreciate the beauty, the jewel-green moss atop the decaying log, the ferns waving slightly in the breeze?
Nothing is not beautiful here, I thought: the weeds, the stumps, the whole trees uprooted and left lying where they fell, their root balls like the inside of giant umbrellas. All of it a pleasure to the eye.
As we grew closer to the exit, the woods became noisier. It was a landscaping crew grooming the yard of a nearby house. Two mowers and a weed whacker. Welcome back, they seemed to say with their jangle and bluster, welcome back to the world.
Framed
The other day I stepped out of my car at the library to return some books and for some reason I was overwhelmed by the blueness of the sky. I don’t think I was imagining it. The sky really was bluer than usual. In fact, it was blotting out the green of the trees and the brown of the brick.
Why the library? Why then? I have no idea. It was a fine, low-humidity afternoon. Recent rains had cleaned the air.
I hurried home, back to where I could put the sky in its place. This is how I view it from the deck, softened by trees and — at least when I snapped this shot — puffed up with clouds.
Intensely blue? Yes. But parceled, balanced — framed.
Fern Forest Floor
A walk yesterday in the late afternoon. Copper and I ran down Folkstone Drive, then ducked into the woods. It was cool and quiet there, and what struck me first was the filtered light. This is a second-growth forest, maybe third- or fourth (if that’s possible). The oaks are 70 to 80 feet or taller, and the birch and hickories and other trees in the canopy shade the smaller plants, give them a vaulted ceiling beneath which to grow.
I take off my sunglasses, hold them in my leash hand. The colors are even more intense now — the dark greens of the holly and the brilliant hues of the newly unfurled ferns. In places the woods are carpeted with ferns. It’s a fern forest floor.
I look more carefully at the delicate fronds, watch them as they wave slightly in the breeze. There is something satisfyingly primordial about ferns, something soothing in their longevity on this planet. They thrive in the indirect light.
As I think of writing about ferns today, Copper tugs at his leash. The ferns are the height of his sturdy little shoulders; he swishes through them when he ventures off the path.
Peepers
I heard them last night, the tiny, vocal frogs we know as spring peepers. Their chorus is a sure sign of spring.
They’re late this year, the little guys. Waiting for warmth, I imagine. We all are.
But who among us makes such music of our contentment?
If I read about peepers (and I think I did long ago) I would learn that their sounds are mating calls — not some existential expression of delight.
Still, after a long winter, in the just-dark of a warm spring evening, existential delight is what I hear.
Old Vine
Lexington is an insider’s town. The one-way streets, the unmarked country lanes, the walled gardens — they come from long knowledge.
I noticed this yesterday as I was driving a route I hadn’t driven in years and on a hunch found the way to Old Vine. Not new Vine, the yin to Main Street’s yang, but Old Vine, which veers off its namesake at an improbable angle.
Inner cheers when I found this shortcut. The raised fist of victory. But I knew it wasn’t my superb navigational powers that led the way. It wasn’t a hunch as much as it was a long-buried map of the city that I carry around inside me.
I found Old Vine because I grew up here.
Landscape of Childhood
In My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead writes:
“[George] Eliot found regenerative inspiration in the remembrance of the landscape of her childhood. Her love for the deep green England of Warwickshire was the foundation of her belief that the love we have for the landscape in which we have grown up has a quality that can never be matched by our admiration of any environment discovered later, no matter how beautiful.”
Mead quotes Eliot from The Mill on the Floss:
“These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows — such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination …”
And later, this line, which I quote in my own book: “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”
I read these passages on a bumpy flight to my hometown, sick at heart, sick in stomach, but imagining the balm that awaited me — my own “furrowed and grassy fields.” And knowing there would be some comfort there. And as always, there has been.
Mottled Sky
Most color has drained from the earth. Now that our white snow cover is gone (though not for long perhaps?), we are left with brown leaves, gray trees — a monochromatic world. On walks these days my eyes are drawn toward the sky, source of light, source of color.
Here, from yesterday, a swirl of blue and white, which brings the word mottled to mind. Splotched, blotched, swirled, streaked.
I like the word mottled, mostly because it reminds me of soft skies like these. But also because I like how the word sounds. Like marbled, which reminds me of sleek granite or fine paper. And rhyming with coddled, as in egg, or child.
But mostly the word, like the sky, stands on its own.
A View in Mind
Cold and snow have hemmed in my walks and runs, have kept me close to home. But yesterday I broke free. Not that it was much warmer than it has been, but it wasn’t snowing or sleeting (yet) so I left the neighborhood for a familiar route.
I darted across the busy street to the trail on the other side, the one with cut-out hedges, the one that always makes me feel like I’m in a maze or a tunnel of English hedgerows. When that trail ended I was at the crest of a rise, where I can see for miles on a clear day.
It wasn’t clear yesterday, but no matter. I have that view in my head. I could see the Dulles control tower, the blue hills beyond it. I could escape the immediate and enter the faraway.