Sketches of a Life in February

[summer_jackel]

Some words.





The deep places are a wound it is unnecessary to share. I find myself mute.

But driving home---and it is February now, so we are closer to the equinox than the cross-quarter, and the days are lengthening---driving home, there is the sky. There is barely light enough to see the tattered remains of cloud, and the air between these dark shreds is of the deepest indigo touched with purple. The Douglas firs are a black informed by green. Such a pure and complicated darkness.

Something in me comes alert, comes alive in the midst of its inwardly directed hurting. And I wonder, how many instants of perfection do we miss, how many mouthfuls of bliss do we ignore every day in our self-absorption, in the necessity to heal and grow and survive? Myriads, of course; nobody could see all of them. But I am glad that for an instant I witnessed the indigo sky.

***

The geese are moving. Weighty and graceful, wary-eyed, grey-bodied with their black masks and the fine curve of neck and bill. I heard them calling last night as they moved overhead in darkness. In the morning, a pair of them rises soundlessly against the grey sky.

I hear both sadness and excitement in the calling of the geese. Something has changed again; the time for movement has come again.

***

Yesterday, it was winter, and just like that, overnight, it isn’t any more. I’d noticed the heralds for weeks; the daffodil bulbs had begun to offer their smooth, intent green shoots, and you could touch swelling at the ends of thin branches everywhere. I’ve learned the pattern: you look for these signs, and you wonder when it’s going to happen, when the day is going to arrive. You hope. You don’t quite believe; it’s not quite time, not yet.

And then to wake one morning to find spring in all of its breathless and spindly-legged glory, the plum trees rioting white and snowing tiny petals all over the yard, the first bud yellowing on the first daffodil I ever bought and planted, the pathetic little rows of spindly trees in the grocery store parking lot exploding in a delicious, deliriously rosy profligacy of blooms.

I can’t help myself. I pluck one, stick it in the brim of my hat next to the feathers and stand a little straighter when I do my shopping. I know that these plum blossoms start wilting into nothing as soon as you pluck them; they’re dying practically the moment they open. Spring is brief, so brief. The daffodils can’t last.

And the hurt’s still there. It would be poetic to say that new grass and flowers heal everything, but of course they really don’t, and after all, most of what’s ailing me had its start in spring to begin with. It remains true that I feel something move inside of myself when I touch and smell and feel the newness everywhere, the life coming ‘round, the fresh shiny fur on all the animals and a bright-plumed raptor taking flight against that peculiar and trembling shade of blue. I can’t help myself, and damn it, it’s wired into animal biology that I can’t evade, no matter how much better I think I know. I want to run and bathe my senses in it, to duck my head in water and roll in the dirt and grass, to love and mate and start things and open myself, inevitably, to hurt again. And only because the greenness and sap and the noise of water drowned other things out, because the undersides of ferns are covered in tiny spores, because my chickens laid their first eggs this week and the air has a new taste to it, the moisture in the ground a new character. Nothing could possibly matter as much as this.

If you can’t evade it anyway, why try.

Comments

[raveness-d.livejournal.com]

You write so beautifully.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[starchy.livejournal.com]

Do more of this, please.

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to do one pr month since October (and succeeding so far, although January, as I recall, was a couple of days late). I've tagged all of these type of entries under 'running dog.'

I'm glad that you enjoyed it.