A Walker in the Suburbs

My first home of memory was a two-bedroom house in a lot full of sunshine and two spindly trees. Our landscape was seared with light. The subdivision was called Idle Hour, named for a farm by that name. As the years have passed, Idle Hour (the neighborhood) has remained stolidly middle class, full of tidy little homes made of brick or fieldstone. The extra wide streets have kept the place perpetually young, looking wet behind the ears, just established, even though it has been around for years.

On my walk yesterday I passed the last stages of a new development in our neighborhood. Most of the houses are completed but the last few are still in process. One of those houses is just a frame and I spotted two workers balanced easily on its roof joists against the blue, blue sky.

The sight of a half-finished house reminds me of my childhood. The hammer and saw are the soundtrack of my youth. I will always associate that buzz and hum with life itself. With herds of children, like young deer running from yard to yard, pressing their noses against the screens of the cool houses next door (the house next door was always cooler, even though none of us had air conditioning) to recruit more members for a rag-tag game of spud. Everywhere we ran or skipped or pulled our wagon in those days we heard the sounds of new construction.

It’s good to hear them again.

Whether by plan or by accident, our brief stay in Indiana came during morel season. And Tom’s brother Phil is one of the most hawk-eyed morel-hunters around. We went for a hike with Phil on Saturday and came back with more than a quart of the wild mushrooms. We cleaned the morels, soaked them and sauteed them in butter. Then we served them with steak and salad.

The morels tasted musty and rich. Eating them was like eating the woods. Every time I took a bite I thought about how precious they were, how they took so much effort to find, but how rewarding it was to discover them tucked up under a pile of leaves or hiding next to an old decaying log. Wild food. It tastes good.

(Photo by Phil Gardner)

As I write this morning my eye is trained on a ceremony happening thousands of miles away. I listen to the men and boy’s choir sing a hymn. I marvel at the vivid reds of the robes and of the carpet that extends down the length of Westminster Abbey (different red carpet above but the best I can muster).

I remember visiting the place, the sacred ground, the poets and the leaders who are buried there, the ceremonies that sanctified the walls and windows and every inch of the air.

In the front of the altar stand a woman in a long white dress with tapering lace sleeves, and a man in a smart red jacket. They are special, these people, but their marriage, like any other, will rise and fall on their own efforts, on how much they can give, on how much they can receive. “Every wedding is a royal wedding,” they are told.

As the ceremony ends the congregation inside the Abbey and everyone outside it sing “Jerusalem,” a favorite of mine since I first saw the movie “Chariots of Fire” many years ago. I take that as a good omen!

In the last few months our dog, Copper, has become afraid of thunderstorms. He is a plucky little guy with strong shoulders and haunches and otherwise unfazed by the world around him. But now he trembles and races for the lowest, most protected ground when he hears a rumble of thunder.

Copper makes me think about fear, the irrationality of it, how it comes unbidden and unbound; how it makes us its own. When I see him like this I want to sit and hold him all day. But even if I could he would have none of it. Fear makes him restless, too.

These twin impulses, to fear and to comfort, they are buried deep down in all of us. So deep that they are often obscured. They dress up in other clothes, they parade around as silliness or ambition or pride or addiction. But they are there. I’m sure of it.

Yesterday was Earth Day; tomorrow is Easter. Today we are nicely tucked between earth and heaven. Which is where we are most comfortable, anyway.

“[It is a] a shabby genteel sentiment,” wrote the 19th-century British historian William Winwood Reade, “which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”

I disagree. It is not a “shabby sentiment” that makes us feel uncomfortable in our human skin, that makes us believe there is something for us after this life is done. We may be wrong, of course. But hope is a choice. An informed choice.

There are springs that flow smoothly from gray deadwood, sodden March soil to greening Aprils and ebullient Mays.

And then there are springs like this one. Several days of dreary clouds and then a jewel (yesterday) or, if you’re lucky, two jewels (today is promising). Rather than spoiling us with a steady pulse, spring teases us, stalls, then overwhelms. It is the mid-game reprieve, the comeback, the career that seemed to be over but somehow springs to life.

It is the dogwood, just flowering. The red buds — where have they been these weeks, how could I have missed their shimmer? The pink tulips I forgot I planted — they are blooming.

When the sun appears, the new grass quivers with green. The oaks are just past budding; each leaf opens heavenward, like a small prayer. And the air, pellucid, perfect.

A day after the 57^th anniversary of the least eventful day since 1900 (see Monday’s entry) came a day that was anything but boring. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight — Yuri Gagarin’s 109-minute flight into the heavens and back again. It was the 66^th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s passing. His sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 63 shocked Americans; he was the only president many of them, including my parents, had ever known. And it was the 150^th anniversary of the first shots fired at Fort Sumter — the opening salvo of the Civil War.

By the time I post this entry, however, this will be yesterday’s news. And I will be wondering why we have become so fond of anniversary stories. Certainly we don’t lack news of our own. I think it may be a way to control the complexity of our lives. And we do honor history by bringing its highlights to our attention. But when the present is littered with the past, it’s hard not to feel encumbered.

Our parish Lenten mission has me thinking about hope. Not the dusty old hope I remember from parochial school. This is a green ribbon, a shoot, a new leaf. It is born of letting go, and it is fed by reading, prayer and quiet meditation. It is not the answer to everything, but already it has loosened the shoulders, smoothed the brow. It is a seed. I plan to water it.

In a passage about landscape and writing in her book American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever describes Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It was one of many ponds in that area created by the uneven melting of glacial ice centuries ago, she writes. It was surrounded by thick forests, and went from being a few feet deep at the shore line to 100 feet deep in the middle. It was beside this pond that Henry David Thoreau built his tiny house.

Thoreau was 28 years old. His brother had died, and the woman he loved had married another. He had also lost the prospect of both a teaching and a writing career. ” Now his work could begin,” writes Cheever.

“I went to the woods to live deliberately, so that I might front the essential facts of things, and might not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau wrote.

More than 150 years later, we still count those lines as among the finest written by an American author. “Although no one in Concord … would realize it for decades,” Cheever wrote. “The shimmering surface of the kettle pond named Walden would be the mirror of Thoreau’s genius for generations to come.”

The pale yellow-green of the witch hazel flower. The dark waxy green of the magnolia leaf. The slight green cast of the March lawn as it stirs to life — these are the greens I see here today.

But in my mind are other greens: the Cliffs of Moher, their ancient, mossy backs emerging from the fog on the west coast of Ireland. The furze that carpets the barren ground. The fields emerald in the sunlight. The many greens of the old sod. It is a day when sentimentality is allowed, singing is encouraged — and green is celebrated.