Thursday, March 30, 2006

Rye and alfalfa.

It's just now occurred to me that I write mostly about nature. I suppose I'm a hippie after all. People have been speculating on it for years. Because I'm thin. Because I occasionally wear my hair long and electric. Because I look as if I don't wear make-up*. Because I look like the sort of girl that doesn't eat hamburgers, though my close friends will attest to the contrary. I just happen to have a hippie sort of aura. I've never liked it. Hippies today, young hippies, are not real hippies. They're stoners and feneants. I am neither.

However, I do love nature. I wish sometimes that I could live in the thick of it like Thoreau. I'd like to live out of eyesight of EP Marts and Wal-marts and Chik-fil-a-s. I'd like to see a Cheshire moon unbound by dull yellow concrete slab faux Carpentiere style suburban dwellings. Or worse, peach brick rancheros. I'd like to nix the posts and poles and septic pumps altogether. Telephones lines gashing a sky full of verbena and lavender and drifting, symmetrical rays distress me to no end. I feel an over-whelming ire when I consider how much more pleasant the place would be without human witnesses.

I don't like that hippie-ness, but there it is.

Yesterday I took an unfamiliar road that led me through low-land swamps.

Tall gray nameless trees with no recognizable bark or leaves to identify them become stark stumps only when they reach telephone pole height. They stab at the sun. Shallow waters, amber and gleaming with tannins from roots and fallen limbs, sprout golden daffodils, and bowl-shaped, shining poppies spike through the shoulder of the road. Gray herons perch, still and lean, in the waters, one with similarly still, lean limbs and undergrowth. Crickets and frogs whistle and hum, hidden.

Nature seems surreal in its real-ness. I think sometimes that it must be impossible.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Redbuds in a gray wood.

Redbuds intrigue me. They are not red but ultraviolet, and they singe the gray branches and bark of the still unawakened sugar maples and black gums. They make the world around them black-and-white, and then it evaporates altogether into a blurred web of lines and spaces. They lean and brush the ground in their trailing length. They sigh and yawn and lie against stout magnolias. They glow and fade and make a neon imprint in a world without neon.

There is a redbud in front of the school, just in front of the principal's window. I pass it every day, and every day I am struck by its otherworldly purpleness, it's radiant, unavoidable beauty. I think every day how thankful I am that I recognize it. I wonder how many eyes fall on it without seeing it.

Friday, March 10, 2006

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

I've found the home of my dreams. The small, 1948 bungalow is the perfect fit for my baby and me. He has a small room - grass green and sky blue - that looks out over what will be a front yard full of red poppies and daffodils. I have a small room - merlot - that looks out over a backyard full of magenta crepe myrtles and buttery dogwoods. The living area is spacious now that the owners have torn down the dividing wall, and they painted it the warm color of golden sand. A little marble fireplace will toast our toes during the winter months, and the three large windows will allow us to survey our kingdom of old flowers and white picket fence in the spring.

Yes, I must have that, too. Why shouldn't I have the serenity and peace that a white picket fence implies? I have allowed in so many intruders in the past, why shouldn't I say to the world, "This belongs to my child. Do not trample." Why shouldn't I have Queen Anne's lace and morning glories and lavender flax in my own yard? I want this small plot of loveliness to belong to me and to mine.

I will hold my little boy's dimpled hand and walk to the grocery store or to church. We will eat chicken salad sandwiches at the little cafe on Washington Street and then stroll through the shady park up the street. We will walk to the library and check out books about bugs and stars and tomatoes. We will say hello to neighbors who say hello to us in return. We will listen to jazz at the old church that was converted into a community arts center.

Once, I loved the shabbiness of my life and my adventures, but now I find that I am drawn to a placid retreat. I have never been a part of a community. I would like to know what that feels like.
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