We are so far into spring now that it feels like summer. I was sick over the weekend so missed my morning and afternoon walks. When I emerged yesterday, I wondered if we had turned seasons. Dry, warm air. . . leaves waving in a wisp of a breeze . . . green all about. Time to water again. And the sweet slightly spicy smell of tulip poplar blossoms was on the air.
I wrote a sort of prose poem back in early-middle March when signs of spring were lighting up my imagination. You can take it as a meditation on what it might be like to be a perennial (perennial plant, that is):
Imagine being a perennial: every March a revelation!
But first imagine days thinning and you letting go, slumping from your full-swaggering height and—even more strange—receding underground, morphing into a slight nubbin of a plant, a root tangle, a bulb . . . .
Then imagine missing winter altogether. Being blind to trees whose once-shaggy heads now wobble stiffly in the cold. Tucked among tree roots, would you sense what happens overhead? Stillness—so many birds gone away—and the occasional clanging of people trudging.
Surely you’d be oblivious to blankets of snow, their dazzling blue sheen in certain lights, and to etched prints of birds and coyotes or the bellowing of owls in starry darkness.
Just imagine sleeping for so long . . . and then later, months later, something tickles: an awareness of fatter days? a curious desire to push up, up through mole-tunneled dirt?
And then there will be the cracking of crust—that is, you spearing soil with what appear to be tender shoots but surely are not: shoots that push aside pebbles, sand grains, clay clods with seemingly small effort, all while prettily dressed in greens, reds, purple.
It is you pressing skyward: your leaves at first crimp-folded and maybe ruby red but in the next moment unpleating and greening, reaching up and out on a March day that now notices you by bathing you in light.
That might be what it's like.
I wrote a sort of prose poem back in early-middle March when signs of spring were lighting up my imagination. You can take it as a meditation on what it might be like to be a perennial (perennial plant, that is):
Imagine being a perennial: every March a revelation!
But first imagine days thinning and you letting go, slumping from your full-swaggering height and—even more strange—receding underground, morphing into a slight nubbin of a plant, a root tangle, a bulb . . . .
Then imagine missing winter altogether. Being blind to trees whose once-shaggy heads now wobble stiffly in the cold. Tucked among tree roots, would you sense what happens overhead? Stillness—so many birds gone away—and the occasional clanging of people trudging.
Surely you’d be oblivious to blankets of snow, their dazzling blue sheen in certain lights, and to etched prints of birds and coyotes or the bellowing of owls in starry darkness.
Just imagine sleeping for so long . . . and then later, months later, something tickles: an awareness of fatter days? a curious desire to push up, up through mole-tunneled dirt?
And then there will be the cracking of crust—that is, you spearing soil with what appear to be tender shoots but surely are not: shoots that push aside pebbles, sand grains, clay clods with seemingly small effort, all while prettily dressed in greens, reds, purple.
It is you pressing skyward: your leaves at first crimp-folded and maybe ruby red but in the next moment unpleating and greening, reaching up and out on a March day that now notices you by bathing you in light.
That might be what it's like.