Slowing Down for Spring

Hurry is, I think, the enemy of spring — or at least of the appreciation of the season’s subtleties.

When the gray, dreary days such as we endured in the winter past yield to blue skies and puffy white clouds, and the azaleas and magnolias and a myriad of other seasonal flowers burst forth, our step lightens. But for many of us, the warming earth simply adds to the list of chores. Although there is pleasure in releasing pent up energy—we must weed the flower beds, prepare the earth for new beds, plant the garden, flush away the pollen  that has painted a mustard color on our cars and concrete, windows and porches—the demands of the rest of the world do not diminish.

WE MARVEL AT the earth’s renewal, but our attention to it is as brief as the dogwood’s blooming and the landscape fades into the background.

We are, as a former diplomat acquaintance put it, time burdened.

And it is our loss.

In the coolness of the morning, a mockingbird runs through its song, reprises it with variations and then repeats the whole thing. The performance merits applause. (Although we had many birds around our home on Lake Martin, there was an absence of mockingbirds, so its song is a particular treat.)

On many of the walking paths in National Village, wildflowers grow. Some are large and showy, others so small and delicate that the walker must stop and look deliberately at his surroundings. Many of them bloom only briefly, but they are no less beautiful than the domesticated flowers around our homes.

THE OPEN FIELDS, such as the large meadow near the Marriott, are awash with color. In the golden morning light they wave in the gentle breeze as if inviting one to walk among them. In the slanting light, the flowers on the thistles are a complex set of geometric structures.

As Housman noted in his paean to the cherry tree, we are allotted only a certain number of springs. It is a pity to waste one.

Mortality Comes Calling

We all are reminded of our own mortality from time to time — an illness or accident that could have been fatal, the death of a friend. When we are young, though the stark reminders that our time on this planet is limited, are quickly erased by the optimism of youth.

The passing of the years, though, brings the reminders more frequently.

A couple of events in recent weeks have touched me directly.

FIRST WAS THE DEATH of a friend and former colleague. He was half a dozen years younger than I, and when we first worked together he was in his early 30s. Our paths separated, and then we worked together again at another newspaper. Our careers, and our energy, were still on an upward trajectory, when he left for another opportunity.

We talked on the telephone every few months and saw each other only occasionally in the years that followed. But the friendship was one of those that that was not eroded by time and distance, and we always picked up with where we had left off. We did not dwell on aches and pains, and the barrier of distance leaves us picturing the other person as he was in days we were together.

In the past couple of months, we’d talked more often. He’d smoked for far too many years, and this winter had been particularly hard on him, sending him to the hospital multiple times with pneumonia. He was weakened, but each time we talked, he was confident that he was going to get better — and I believed he would get better, too. I would come visit, I promised, when he was feeling a little stronger. 

PNEUMONIA STRUCK again, though, and I did not realize until the last few weeks that he would not come home from the hospital.

I was taking comfort in the knowledge that he embraced life fully when word came that another friend, a contemporary, who had cheerfully fought cancer to a standstill for many years now was seeing the contest edge in the other direction. He is a realist, and, having toted up the cost of expensive drugs that at most could add only a few months to his life, he has decided to take as much enjoyment as he can in the time that remains.

All of this leaves me saddened, of course, and more conscious that the horizon looms ever closer.

But if youth is optimistic, age is stoic, and the Latin expression Dum vivimus vivamus  — is a "While we live, let us live" — becomes more relevant.

The poet A. E. Housman, I think, was both the optimist and the stoic when he wrote that  “… since to look at things in bloom fifty springs are little room, about the woodlands I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.”

There are no cherry trees here, perhaps, but pears and dogwoods will do nicely.