With all my travels this year my attention to local seasonal changes have a quality of artifical abruptness. My regular visits to the Montlake Fill are marked in intervals of weeks, not days. Last time I was there, the place was full of migrating Yellow-rumped Warblers and Robins, and the winter birds were still in force. This morning I heard not a single warbler, but the air was filled with swallows, which uplifted me to a degree that surprised me. It was cold and rainy, which usually puts me a good mood anyway, but to see the clouds of chattering swallows hoisted me into yet a higher level of joy and contentment. The world is all right after all, despite so much evidence to the contrary. The swallows are back.
The hills of Seattle have a faint glimmer of dusty green, that momentary blush of early spring that lasts barely a week before the trees are fully leafed out and it looks like summer. The garden is in its heady spring-forth mode, with promiscuous blooms and shoots everywhere, and it is beyond me to maintain it this season. I have hired a gardener, an intensely cheerful woman who speaks of my plants as though they have gender ("He would look much better against the stone") and is correcting my mistakes in placement by the attitude that plants have wheels and can be as easily rearranged as furniture.
I have a rare weekend to myself, as Robin is in Chicago at a board meeting. The cat is morose and depressed by her absence, and is more demanding than usual for me to brush her, which is apparently my only function in her life. The rest of the time she monitors the activity on the street from her window perch. Every person, every dog, every crow, every gust of wind is tracked. She’s the watch-kitty. If she were a person she’d be the nosy, sanctimonious old lady who gossips about all the goings on in the neighborhood.
Robin and I will have barely 10 hours together before I take off on my next shoot, back to Randolph College (previously, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) in Lynchburg. I get in a day early, where I’ll catch a contra dance in Asheville, North Carolina. Stay tuned.
"The world is all right after all"... I know exactly what you mean. Do you know the poem "Swifts" by Ted Hughes (from the Season Songs book)?
"They've made it again,
Which means the globe's still working..."
We've another few weeks to wait for that moment, even in the very south of the UK, when the swifts and swallows scream back in from their African vacation. But every year it makes me happier & higher.
Posted by: Mike C. | March 26, 2007 at 01:33 AM