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Two Springs

Two Springs


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.

Yesterday’s Post

Yesterday’s Post

A day after the 57th 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 66th 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 150th 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.

A Seed to Water

A Seed to Water


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.

A Pond

A Pond


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.”

Green

Green


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.

Japan

Japan


Yesterday: a walk at lunchtime. A still morning with just enough warmth in the air that I only wear a sweatshirt — but just enough chill in the air that I wish I had worn more. In my ears, Vivaldi, “The Four Seasons.” In my head: thoughts of the tragedy in Japan, “thoughts that lie too deep for words.” The multiple catastrophes, the layered ironies — they are almost too much to comprehend.

Some offers of help have come with a statement saying that this is not Japan’s disaster alone; that it belongs to the world community, that we will all help however we can. With the worsening news of nuclear explosions and meltdowns the disaster may yet belong to all of us. But it belongs first of all to the Japanese people, and what I find most heartbreaking is their stoicism and dignity. To say that we pray for them is a given. Would it help to say we can’t stop thinking about them, that those of us on safe, dry ground (if there is such a thing) are crying for them?

Almost-Spring

Almost-Spring


A long walk this weekend made me catch my breath. Everywhere I looked were green shoots, tremulous buds. High up in the woods, a pinkish haze of near-budding boughs. Every year I notice this: that for trees, spring starts at the top. Reckoned by calendar and temperature it is still winter, but the lengthening days, the bold plants reasserting themselves, the warmth in the air — all these speak to a shoulder season of green promise and yellow possibility. A season in its own right, a season of potential — almost-spring.

Analytics

Analytics


A Walker in the Suburbs was about a month old when a well meaning friend asked,”So how many people visit each day?” It was a good question and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer it.

But I would soon find out.

This was before Google provided its own viewer statistics right on the blog, so I signed up with something called StatCounter, a very humane outfit out of Ireland that displays stats on page loads and “uniques” (as we cognoscenti call them!) and will break down results into days, weeks or “fortnights” (that and the fact that it’s an Irish company instantly endeared them to me).

So I would check StatCounter in the evening to see how each post was doing. And then I started glancing at StatCounter once or twice during the day, too. It reminded me of the months after my book came out, when I visited Amazon.com daily (hourly?) to see where Parents Who Think Too Much was ranked. That became an obsession too, for a while.

As you might imagine, all this checking and re-checking did little for my creative fervor. In fact, it was completely counterproductive. I began Walker to shake loose the shackles of editorial judgment — and here I was imposing something even worse on myself, a minute-by-minute tally of the ether.

I don’t check StatCounter or Google Analytics anymore. I write, submit and forget (or try to!). I hope someone is reading my posts, I hope many people are, but with billions of blogs in the world, I have no illusions.

Solar Power

Solar Power


Yesterday at lunchtime I took a 20 minute walk to clear my head. The rain had stopped, the sun had come out, birds were singing. I felt a bit guilty, thinking about friends and family shivering in the ice and snow elsewhere, but those feelings didn’t last long. It felt good to be walking, not sliding. And the air had a freshness to it that was born of quick thawing and the faint scent of soil. The warmth drew people from their office buildings.

It reminded me of our trip to Vienna last spring when cold rainy mornings would give way to warm afternoons. The minute the sun appeared the Viennese would be eating ice cream cones. The two events were so simultaneous that advance planning seemed to be involved. How else could the ice-cream eaters have stood in line, bought their cones and already been enjoying them the minute the weather changed?

I never figured this out. But on my sun-splashed walk yesterday I decided it was further proof of human adaptability and the powerful influence of our nearest star.

Winter Sunrise

Winter Sunrise


Some of these cold mornings the sun seems reluctant to rise. It is faraway and wan. But other days it reddens the horizon. It is the only color in a monochromatic winter landscape. Those are the days when I’m glad to have a camera.