Meanwhile the world goes on

Now this I can do. I can’t do hot dry summers and I can only half-do the depressing cold, but I can do a rainy mid-March early evening with blackbirds perched on the grating outside of my window. I can do looking through open blinds and seeing the light move over the wet brown grass, and I can do standing by my car for a few minutes and smelling the damp air.

There’s something in this that reminds me of being a teenager in my old burned house, shaking off the school day and standing in the middle of my bedroom, with the lights off and the blinds half-closed, waiting to be called downstairs for dinner. Something about relishing a normally boring, oppressive routine, and having that tiny, warm, lazy moment - even at sixteen - where I knew I was safe and loved, not only by my parents, but by the evolution of birds and seasons. And I don’t mean God, because I don’t personally have one of those. I mean, as Mary Oliver says:

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

I’ve felt this here and there in the past five years, though March in Minnesota is nothing compared to March in Virginia. But it’s nice to know in all of this - and there’s a lot of this - that I can lean out of my kitchen window and watch the sun go down over the wet earth, and feel inexplicably excited about nothing at all. And that in a few hours I’ll be sitting down to dinner with husband - my husband! loved and adored - and that I’ve somehow developed an insane unexpected joy in making food and taking care of him this way.

Spring - when it’s done right - makes me corny, but it also makes me fall in love. And it’s done right today.

I was writing about this same thing - more or less - at this time last year.

Posted by: Zosia | 03-21-2007 | 05:03 PM
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