I’ve
been catching scents: crossing the parking lot at school when suddenly I smell
the mud, just briefly, and then it’s gone again. I know that mud, I know that
smell, I think, it’s the late winter smell that comes after several days of
thawing, the ground soft underfoot, water coming up as you press the earth
down. It comes with the sideways sweep of wind on your arms until suddenly you
know, without knowing how, that maybe you won’t need to wear a sweater
tomorrow, and you start watching the trees for budding. I look for the moss,
delicate sharp flowerlets of bright green, no larger than a thumbtack. The
grass is still brown, the soil looks dead, but bending closer under the cover
of withered grass is the moss: luxurious, rampant, abundant, if oh so tiny.
From here on in I know that spring is coming, even if it snows again. I live in
this world, I am embedded in this world, I am the world, and even if I forget
it sometimes the truth remains because, see, there’s a whiff of mud suddenly as
I cross the parking lot at school.
I hear the birds so clearly now. I
woke up this morning thinking kids were playing on the street and it was the
birds: loud, joking, calling their good-mornings to the sky and to each other.
I went for a walk today through
town, up by all the older houses and the cemetery. I was going along, in my own
head, when I was struck by a rosebush in front of me. How else can I say it:
the sight of the tangled branches, the thorns, the dried rose-hips stopped me
as surely as if I’d been hit. All the many shades of brown in the new stems,
now gray, lined, no longer thorned but weathered, crisp; the delicacy of the
rose-hips purple-red-brown and tough, their hard shiny surface surrounded with
a lace of leftover leaves. These had lasted the winter, the storms and the
wind, the carelessness of people passing no longer looking now that the roses
were gone. The roses told me: stop, and, slow down, and I did, I did, in time
to see the tree limb weaving the air into being for me, in time to watch the
rippling of water beneath my feet. I stopped and looked below the grate and saw
the coursing of water two feet below me. There is water beneath my feet! I
stood and listened to the water flowing by, on its own way, water tumbling over
itself and joined by more and more water winding its way down the streets to
the grate, to… I realized I didn’t know where the water went to after that. I
left this for another day and continued walking, but before I had even gone
five feet I was stopped by another call of water falling, running. Two grates!
one on each side of the street, and I stood there and listened to the water
running on both sides of me, running down, running down from everywhere, and now
I could hear the plink, plink of water dripping onto slate below a tree and the
faster fall of water in the gutters and drainpipes along the houses. Everywhere
was water, water, and I stood in the middle of it all and listened.
Cheers -
SA
