Spongy mulch, dripping ferns, glistening flowers.
The summer garden got a good soaking yesterday, and this morning it is renewed, refreshed, restored.
I’m still thinking about the tropical gardens, though, the orchids and bromeliads, how they draw their sustenance from rainfall cupped and gathered, how they use it to make food.
Plants of the air, plants of the earth — water common to both.
I grew up with this expression, used to describe a patch of cool summer weather. I’ve been thinking about it the last few mornings waking to temperatures in the high 50s — in July!
“A colloquial expression used in the south and midwest North America referring to a cold snap that occurs in late spring when the blackberries are in bloom,” Wikipedia says.
That’s not the way I remember it. Late-spring cold was dogwood winter. Mid-summer cold was blackberry winter. The time when blackberries were in fruit — not in flower.
Doesn’t matter. Both are lovely ways to talk about unseasonable chill. Poetic descriptions of essential contradictions.
And the blackberries are in fruit and ready for picking. I see them along side roads and fence rows, in what remains of the meadow. They should peak this weekend.
(Photo: Wikipedia)
Driving home yesterday, dashing through puddles left from an earlier shower, racing to reach the house before the skies opened for another deluge, I thought about where I was. It was an interval of time, true, but it was also a place. The Land between Storms. The terrain: Steaming pavement, black clouds, a feel in the air that was part peace and part anticipation.
How many other times are places? The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the last week of May. But these are fixed in time, not mobile like the Land Between Storms.
There is also the place that springs up after a blizzard. A world of white — silent for an hour or two then filled with the sound of snowblowers whirring and shovels scraping.
It has taken me a long while to realize the commonality of these experiences, how they pull together sights, sounds and smells so reliably, so ineluctably, that I can find the places every time.
You forget what it’s like. The feeling of moving slowly through the atmosphere, pushing it aside, clouds of moisture.
You forget what it does to your hair. How all attempts at order and smoothness are in vain.
You forget how it warms and comforts you, this steam bath that we move through most summer days. And the muggy nights, so full of ache and promise.
For the last weeks we’ve lived in a dream: cool nights, warm days, sweaters after the sun goes down. But something was missing.
The humidity is back. Summer is here.
Here we are at May Day — sodden, squishy, water-logged. The petals of our dogwood, our Kwanzan cherries, scattered and beaten to the ground. Our airy forget-me-nots hardly the azure clouds they were three days ago. The azaleas hesitant, unwilling to bloom.
After this winter, I’d hoped for a knock-’em-dead spring. Something to warm and delight us. But nature doesn’t operate like that, I tell myself. Rain pelts and puddles — or fails to fall at all. Winds funnel and destroy. Sometimes, snow even falls in spring.
The balance we seek, the recompense, is not in the natural world. If it is to be, we must supply it.
It seems as if we’ve gotten all our April showers in the last two days, last night in particular. Walking to and from Metro in these downpours has made me ponder the efficiency — or inefficiency — of my umbrella.
The way I look at it you have a choice. You can either have a small umbrella with you at all times, a folding insurance policy, or take along a large one when the weather calls for it.
I’ve opted for the former. It’s easier to maneuver, fits in a pocket or bag and is light to carry.
But what it boasts in portability it lacks in coverage. It’s the diameter, I guess. There simply isn’t enough nylon to keep all the drops at bay.
I think there’s a life lesson here; I’m just a little too soggy now to figure it out.
On Saturday I spotted signs of spring, snowdrops and green shoots, that pinkish haze that appears in the tree tops, proof the old oaks are coming to life.
It struck me as I strolled that I might be imagining the greening branches, the swollen buds, that maybe they were like the puddles of water that appear on a hot summer tarmac.
Because today, St. Patty’s Day, I’m not so sure. It looks like a foot of snow outside. It’s the whiting of the green. And for some reason, I welcome it.
It’s such a quiet, dutiful dousing, wet and heavy, clinging to each twig and bough. It stills me — and fills me with wonder, that such meteorlogical marvels can exist this far into the greening season.
Spring will come soon, no way it cannot. The shoots and buds are biding their time. But for now, on this day devoted to green, we have a different kind of beauty. It’s white.
My suburb is quiet, given its proximity to a major international airport. But when a wild wind barrels in from the west, planes are routed over the house and the sound of jet engines fills the sky. The harder the wind blows, the more planes there seem to be. Just the opposite of what one would like, of course.
Last night the airliners seemed to be using Folkstone Drive as a runway and skimming the tops of the tall oaks. The fact that I was dodging limbs and crunching over downed tree branches on the drive home only heightened this impression. I was glad to pull into the garage.
But this morning the wind still roars and the planes still circle. Winter is back, and it wants us to know it.
Any walker will tell you which way the wind blows. Whether it roars in from the west or brushes up from the south, all soft and warm.
Often it makes the difference: How long I walk or how far.
On a route I’m getting to know here in Lexington, the west wind smacks me in the face every time I turn a corner. I know my directions here, so that helps. But I think I would know the west wind anywhere. It is not timid or subtle. It takes my breath away.
But oh, the joy of having it at my back. It pushes me all the way home.
If Eskimos have 50 words for snow, then we tired, winter-weary suburbanites have 50 words for the substances that keep us going through the snow.
There is snow melt and grit and cinders and kitty litter and rock salt (although that may not be around anymore for environmental reasons). The other day I heard a radio announcer suggest table salt. Sometimes there is just a residue of salt, but seeing it convinces me there’s no black ice and it’s safe to traverse that patch of sidewalk.
Above all, of course, there are the tractors that spread this stuff.
They may not be pretty, but they are our heroes.