I am sitting in front of a picture window that looks out onto acres of back yard, watching the pollen swoop in lazy, wind-battered circles towards the patio floor, colliding with birds and unnameable insects in their spring frenzy as buds split open into riotous shades of green and white and pink as far as the eye can see.
My dog snores happily on the couch behind me, relieved that I am here within watching distance and not getting in a car to hover over my laptop and a cup of coffee in a cafe twenty miles away.
After a winter of no leaves and no snow, I feel guilty for having doubted the beauty would return again. I have realized the value of evergreens in a landscape, in spite of my preference for the ostentatious display of plants that die and come back again. “Was it this lush last year?” I keep asking my mother, who claims to only remember the saturated view coloring last July and August, even though we’ve both just endured a winter of stumps and empty branches and a meadow of dead leaves—memorials to beauty in their own right.
I am claiming this metaphor for my internal ramblings this spring, attempting to uncoil innumerable story lines whose budding branches are creeping round the windows of my soul and taking up my admiration and concentration in lieu of the other things I might observe or aspire to obtain in “real life.”
I’m caught up in witnessing the effortless bolting of one tree over the other; am altogether overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of work to be done in taming such unbridled growth that some days it is all I can do to sit, pollen-riddled but hopeful, trying to understand what my role is in nature’s grand design. Are the trees happy and flourishing because—finally—they have people to watch their movements, after years of their house sitting empty, waiting for a steward?
If I am slow in delivering typed and manicured landscapes for your enjoyment, please forgive me. I am trying to battle allergies and the existential musings that accompany a spring woodland and the realization that a small person with a small keyboard is arguably insignificant when compared to such wonders.
Once my Claritin-induced fog clears, I will be finishing Chapter 6.
Until then, here’s the soundtrack to today’s internal ramblings: