Yesterday I went to see the cherry blossoms at the tidal basin. It was a fresh, just-drenched morning with a bar rainbow (looking like a colorful UPC code) in the sky above National Airport. There were low clouds and intermittent rain.
The blossoms were past peak, so I had them (almost) to myself. Pink petals piled on the pavement, clung to tree bark, dotted park benches. It was a pointillistic paradise. The beauty was still there; it was just broken and scattered.
Now that my blog is in its second year I sometimes worry that I will repeat myself, write the same post on the same day. After all, many of my posts are about the seasons and the cyclical nature of life. Or, maybe I only have 350 thoughts, give or take one or two, and it’s inevitable that I recycle them.
I say this as a preface to writing about violets, because I wrote about them last year. But this year I want to single out their punctuality, how I can always count on seeing them as soon as April arrives. I saw the first violets of the season on Saturday, when I lifted up the screen that had been protecting young lettuce and saw instead the first violet. Such a sweet, unassuming flower — but nevertheless a product of complex forces and drives. How else to explain the punctuality?
The timing of blossoms is big business around here; predicting the cherry trees’ peak bloom is both an art and a science. But what strikes me when I look at the violet is that its timing and placement is always perfect. Less heralded, but always on time.
Twenty-four years ago, in Lexington, Kentucky, it was snowing on this day. It had been an unseasonably warm March, but the weather changed when the new month blew in. And by April 4, our wedding day, it wasn’t just flurrying, it was snowing hard, drifting and accumulating, slowing traffic and obliterating spring.
We drove behind the plow on the way to the church, tiptoed through slush on our way to the reception. The snow left a delicate filigree on car windows, buried the daffodils and bent near to breaking the just-blooming dogwood trees. Friends from up north, expecting balmy breezes, braved the weather in light floral prints and big-brimmed hats. The day was a joyful blur of blossoms and snow flakes.
It was not what we’d planned or expected, and was therefore a good way to begin married life. More than two decades later, no one has ever forgotten our wedding day. We certainly haven’t!
It is a day of clouds and sun, of wind and flower. I have yet to walk; I’m about to now. But I can tell from the weather that the wind will challenge, the sun will warm and maybe the rain will fall, too. It will be a walk that is not unlike life.
I found in my photos a snapshot of a small windmill, a decorative one, I think, but suitable enough for illustration. It makes me think about how much a day can buffet us and how important it is to have a compass, something that helps point the way, that keeps us on track. Something that keeps us heading down our own truth path, steady to our own true north.
To live in the suburbs is to orbit rather than to center, for our very existence is built on proximity to the city. You could say that all towns exist in complement to others, their services and spaciousness reflecting how close or far they are from the next best place. But we who live on the periphery, we were never intended for anything but the vast outer ring. Our place has no point but to serve another.
Still, what begins accidentally can proceed with purpose, and so I walk and listen and search for what lies beneath the subdivisions and shopping centers. Because what is true is deep, and what is deep is hard to find no matter where you look for it.
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through Boston and New York and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we call reality … ” Thoreau wrote in Walden. “Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”
Re-reading yesterday’s post (yes, I do this sometimes!), I realized it might sound as if the only error in the magazine is the one I intentionally left in. I wish that were true! The problem is, I know there are errors, but I can’t always find them. Proofreading is an art, not a science. It has clear rules and expectations, but also a bit of the mysterious. How else to explain my ability to look right at a mistake and not see it — until it’s in print.
What I was trying to get at yesterday (and which deserves longer treatment later) is the process of letting go that accompanies creative work. At some point you must come to terms with the fact that the essay/painting/song/magazine will not be perfect. Otherwise you will never finish. Humility can be of some help in this endeavor.
For the last week I’ve been in “crunch mode,” editing and proofing the magazine, reading pages over and over and over again looking for misplaced commas, extra spaces and other minutiae. There comes a point with every issue when I must let something go, when the cost to fix the error is too high or too risky, because it could result in a mistake more grievous than the one it hopes to repair.
It is at this point that I think about the humility block. This is the practice of making an intentional error in a quilt — turning a block the wrong way, for instance — to avoid perfection. Only God is perfect, the theory goes, so it’s presumptuous to create something that rivals the divine. Rug weavers do the same thing, slip in a odd thread or two to mar their creations and avoid the “evil eye.”
Sounds good, but from what I’ve been able to learn, it’s not true. It’s a lovely story, a myth; the mistakes in antique quilts are just that — mistakes. But I like knowing that deep in the class notes section of the magazine is a boldface comma that should be Roman. It’s my humility block.
Photo: Courtesy of Etsy.com.
In the first stirrings of spring, reminders of autumn. Not only from the chill air we’ve had these last few days (and Sunday’s dusting of snow), but also from the auburn halo of our budding trees, which shimmer like fall when viewed from a distance. I’m not sure of this, but I strongly suspect the buds are making my eyes water, too.
But all is forgiven because it is spring. And the red buds that stand out against the blue sky, that scatter themselves across the greening grass, they are just part of the bounty and the beauty of the season. A season that tips its hat to the work of nature that made it possible.
Today my thoughts lie across the frosty Allegheny Mountains, hundreds of miles north and west of here to a small town in Ohio where a silly parade will step off at 5 p.m. Students in costumes and face paint, at least one mannequin head on a stick and several kilt-wearers with near frostbitten knees will be led by a bagpiper and an administrator dressed as a Tootsie Roll. The pipes will drone “Scotland the Brave” and the jolly band will weave its way through the College of Wooster campus.
The celebration is all part of I.S. Monday, the day Wooster students turn in the independent studies they’re worked on for months (in some cases years) and receive in exchange a Tootsie Roll and a parade. It seems like only a few months ago that Suzanne was writing us about all the excitement when she witnessed the festivities her first year in college; now it’s her fourth and final year — and she and her fellow ’11 classmates are the stars of the show.
A parade to honor academic achievement, what’s been described as “an academic Mardi Gras” — that’s an idea that appeals to me. To say nothing of the Tootsie Roll!
Photo Credit: The College of Wooster
Among the many advantages of walking in the suburbs is this one: It is difficult to read a newspaper while doing it. Am I the only one who feels that there is almost too much bad news to absorb these days? Chaos in the Mideast. Nuclear peril in Japan. A humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
Today’s only good news (Kentucky’s two-point win over Ohio State in the final seconds of the NCAA “Sweet Sixteen”) happened too late to make it into the Washington Post. And so, I close the newspaper, lace up my walking shoes and take to the pavement. It’s my way to make things make sense.