Spring Bounce

When the nice weather comes, people start expressing themselves; they just can’t help it. They shed clothes, for one thing. Last week I saw so many pale pairs of legs I thought I was at the Ballet.  Any minute now, sunburns will start to show, along with the permanent tans of the boat lovers, whose shins gleam winter and summer with the same shiny brown you see on a horse chestnut. And the shedding of clothes is hardly the end of it. Come the warm weather, folks also begin stepping outside their normal pathways. I know I did this one spring day when, still enough of a baby to be in training pants, I took a small Bible from the bookshelf and headed down the street to church.  Adventure! was all I thought. But oh what earnest teaching I was subjected to after by the many grownups in our house, who could only pray that I had learned my lesson. I hadn’t: Three months later, with my mom watching me through the kitchen window as she fixed me a snack, I sat in the sandbox of our fenced-in yard. I was right there - until suddenly I wasn’t. And then followed the running around and calling my name, the searching and the summoning of police.All I remember is how happy I felt, toddling in my little yellow sunsuit with the ruffly-bottom seat, on up Charlotte Street to Blue Hill Avenue, then across McClellan, to arrive at last at the Endicott School.  My sister wasn’t there in the schoolyard of course, nor was any child.  Recess was over, and when I turned for home I grew confused and toddled on past not only my own street but eight or ten streets more.  Back home, meanwhile, the drama kept unfurling, as a policeman ascended our steps lugging somebody else’s bellowing child (who of course was bellowing, since she knew very well that she didn’t live there.)When my family finally found me, I was eating ice cream and holding onto the baby-laden stroller of a young mother from Eastern Europe, who spoke no more a recognizable brand of English than I did.But really this is no big story. This is just what people do when the air is soft and the daylight feels unending: They go on walkabout. I see it in my own town. A few days back, at schoolday’s end, I watched as an eight-year-old dashed out of the brick fortress that had held him all day and danced on down the sidewalk, executing a perfect penguin impression as he tilted from side to side, his hands jammed down into the sides of his pants.And that was nothing compared with what I witnessed the following day, when three middle-school girls, who had been awaiting the “Walk” light to help them cross the street, started out into the busy intersection. Two of them, bearing backpacks, sailed across, as stately as a couple of swans. The third, free of backpack and stateliness both, got herself right into the middle of intersection - where, with traffic from five different streets stopped, she hopped twice and executed a perfect cartwheel, right there on the asphalt. If we hadn’t all been strapped in our cars, I think every last motorist would have given her a standing ovation. I know I yearned to.I yearn to salute all signs of high spirits. I yearn to applaud every length of limb on display.And sometimes – ah sometimes! – I do yearn to go back to the time of that little ruffly-bottomed sunsuit.    

New Day

I'm up north writing this. On Friday I sat on the deck here in 60-degree warmth, basking in sunlight. Then, an hour before sunset a big wind came along and tickled the treetops till they bent over laughing. It was a day like the painted landscapes inside one of those peek-a-boo Easter eggs: beautiful.  Then... we woke to a six-hour snowstorm. We think we know what a day will bring us, but we never do really. Example; this picture I just took with spring and winter together .... Where are those footsteps leading, forward into spring or back into winter?Anyway, that was yesterday. I post this today at 6am, hopeful of a return to the warmth. Today at the family celebration I will wear ivory colored slacks and a pale green sweater and will hope to look a little less like the grizzly bear I resembled yesterday in my furry brown jacket.This year I didn’t dye Easter eggs, what with our little people away in Florida. Nor did I try making the family bunny cake recipe, which is just as well since it always looks to me more like a bunny corpse, covered for decency with a white sheet of coconut. And thank God I didn’t have to go to the Mall, that industrial-strength crowd-magnet. Instead, I worked on my refinishing project and read my book and talked with David about how badly you can hurt yourself even just falling off a small step ladder if you don’t keep those quick-reacting stabilizer muscles active. We talk that way to each other for courage.The sun is just coming up now, see how lovely? A new day for us all; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

and now, with the sun so strong already, a last coat of finish on that just-stripped table 

Look Up, Dummy

This is  me with my new phone.  And yes that's my old phone in pieces on the floor beside me. (I bit it; I was mad.)I like this picture because it reminds me  how all of us are in this head-bent position all the time. We have so many screens in our lives, so many little gadgets we're poking and peering down at, while all this time the real excitement is happening above our heads.I mean the birds. The birds are going by thick and fast now. I feel like I’m on the tarmac at the airport almost, the big commercial birds and the little private birds, all zooming past. At 6 o'clock this  morning the sky was thick with them the way it used to be thick with passenger pigeons in America’s early days when they literally darkened the skies so numerous were they - until those pasty-faced Europeans arrived in the 1600s that is. They shot and ate them by the hundreds of thousands; then shot them and fed them to the pigs; then just plain shot them idly and for sport the way they later shot the buffalo, and in such numbers that by the year 1900 they were all but gone and by 1914 the very last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Sad.No birds are dying up there now though. You look up into the clean late-March skies and find yourself rooting for them, just the way you secretly did the first time you saw Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie.They're ba-a-a-a-ck!  Go to the window right now and look up. (And for heaven's sake turn off the phone!)

Wherever You Go There You Are

When you’re in one place you think of the other. I always notice for example that a mall in Florida isn’t like a mall up north. Our malls don’t have ice skating rinks in them yet well do I remember my little niece climbing into a wee skating skirt such as you’d put around a 20-inch Christmas tree and heading off to the mall. Up north, you want to skate, just fail to look down for four months of the year. Up north, you want an early spring you paint it on your windows like this lady is doing at the neighborhood food store.People in Florida look different too, more burnished-seeming, even in winter, the people of color a well as the white folks. Up north all winter we look like a bunch of root vegetables, he’s a potato, I’m a parsnip. Sometimes I look down at one of my knees and think I’m a mushroom. I’m even checking for those specks of black  you get on mushrooms,  bits of  humus they say it is but we all know it’s really what the night-soil gatherers brought down from the mountain, only reduced now to a harmless powder.Southerners are fatter too, the state with the most obesity being Mississippi, no doubt on account of the fact that there’s a Waffle House on every corner. We don’t have that, not in Massachusetts anyway, and I see now where our state boasts the very lowest rate for obesity in the nation. So what DO we have on every corner? Nail salons. Day spas where you can get a tan sprayed on you by young women in low-cut tops. And of course right now a million storefronts offering to help you prepare your taxes. Don’t forget those taxes people! And remember to note that whatever city, state or kingdom you find yourself in today there’s always the chance you’ll round a corner and run into a sight like this one, ahhhh!

Do it Yourselfers

Yesterday I talked about the crocuses growing up out of my sad dry Shredded Wheat of a lawn but I didn’t get to say what I like best about them: they color outside the lines. One year they just jumped their beds and started sowing purple in amongst the clover. Then the violets heard about it so come June they’ll be doing the same.I say God Bless all the creative improvisers! Like my young cousin who decided one day that she'd just about had it with those stupid braces, and so went and got out a few tools out and took ‘em off herself!

On Time and the Beatles

Is it true that there’s no death? That we’re all still as young as these lads from Liverpool? It sure seems that way now because here come the crocuses,  thrusting their little mouths up into the light like baby birds eager for breakfast. It just makes you feel hopeful.Yesterday I took Uncle Ed out. He’ll be 90 this year and at five-foot-three  and 230 lbs. you could say he’s on the heavy side. You look at him and think “Heart attack!”  Then you remember he gets down on his hands and knees every week to scrub the kitchen floor and so what if he got stuck in that position when his back went the time he was replacing a nut at the base of the toilet bowl. He’s 89. And he has a very big tummy, and he was on his hands and knees, replacing a nut at the base of the toilet bowl.On the little urban pond we drive to every day we look at the seagulls perched on the ice melting away fast now like manna at noontime. “How do their fannies not get cold?” he asks. “I have no idea, let’s Google it” I say. I peer down into my smarty-pants phone and wonder how to frame the question. And we feel like a couple of Second Graders there in the sun. Maybe like these fellas above in the youngest picture I have ever seen of them, or like the earth right now: so full of possibility. So full of life.

Easter PJs

 

       I couldn’t wait. I dyed Easter eggs a whole month ago and the little guys helped, the 22-month-old here dipping his from the red to the green to the purple so that in the end his eggs all turned a blackish-brown, the color of earth. The earth is cracking moistly open now. It looks like the surface of a pan of brownies set to cooling on the rack.

        Remember the bad old days when you could buy live chicks at Easter and they were dyed purple and pink? You could buy baby bunnies too if you didn’t mind spending the rest of your life toting bales of hay.

      I myself have always yearned to have a bunny but ‘Noooo’ intones my vet. ‘You never put a rabbit together with cats.’ An yet my new friend Jen tells me her cats used to curl right up against her bunny for their naps.

      Easters when I was little my mother used to make a special cake shaped like a rabbit which her diary says I called our ‘Eating Bunny.’ This was almost 57 years ago, the month after I turned three but I still have the heavy iron mold for it right downstairs, come to think of it. Was it her spirit that made me reach for the pound-cake mix at the store just now?

     I think I’ll get up early tomorrow and make her cake. And when those babies that would have been her great-grand-babies come later on, maybe we’ll dye the frosting yellow or pink - or,  if this Little One Who Doesn’t Yet Talk has his way, the blackish-brown of the earth after a good hard rain like today’s.