Precious Things
Copper in the morning hours and gold at peak of noon,
And sparkling like a thousand gems until the silver moon
Highlights the constellations of diamonds in the sky—
None has a richer treasury than Nature has—and I.
I don’t own a pool. Poor, poor me. Weep for me, all ye who have any tears to spare. Ha ha! Just kidding!! I’ve never, ever owned—or even felt compelled to own—a swimming pool, actually. I’m much too lazy to want the responsibility of either maintaining a pool or keeping it secure, and even too lumpish to be an avid swimmer. My only claim to fame in the latter regard is that I managed, almost inexplicably, to pass the required lifesaving/pool safety class at my high school, and this I only accomplished because I was stubborn and kind of unsympathetic as a rescuer, having learned some dandy but unfriendly tricks for subduing a panicked person who was struggling ‘uncooperatively’ while drowning.
When the weather gets hot enough, I might turn a slightly more longing eye toward any swimming pool in my vicinity, if only for the cooling of my heels. But I’m too pragmatic in my aversion to labor to indulge in the fantasy for very long. Just until the latest hot flash or external heat wave diminishes a bit, at most.
So it’s kind of funny, even to me, how incredibly rejuvenated and rejoiced I am the minute I get to the coast anywhere. I forget, conveniently and blessedly, between times quite what an impact being near open water has on my spirits even though I don’t relish swimming in it and don’t even care especially about wading in it. The tang of the water’s salt and the occasional spritz of mist when a breeze carries it to my cheek, these are the attributes that pull at my heart. The gentle, steady lapping of tidewater as it sweeps back and forth across the scree and sand, this is the soundtrack of my contentment.
You can keep your gently chlorinated, mosaic-spangled, sanitized beauties, all of you pool owners out there. I don’t mind the special occasion of dipping my toe into the temperate, turquoise splendors of such sparkling basins when I can, but I will always lean toward the shore. Call me when your tidepool sports dancing anemones and bold sea stars, your lap pool spontaneously cleans itself with a refreshing swish and spray of tidal movement, and your patio is scattered with shells and sandblasted gems of glass and dried seaweed in graceful bouquets and…well, I guess I’ll see you when I get back from the ocean.
No matter what the reasons, the weather is different these days than both what I grew up with (all those centuries ago!) and what the locals in most places call ‘the usual’—really, really different. It’s not that Toronto has suddenly become the center of the tropics or San Salvador is now an iceberg floating along the edge of a glacier, it’s just different. The highs and lows have become both more pronounced and more prolonged in many places, from what I can see.
Where I grew up in Seattle, for example, its mythic status as Rain City and the region’s fame as being constantly wet were exaggerated, much of the truly soaking rain happening on the Olympic Peninsula as a result of the mountains’ effect on traveling clouds, weather fronts, and so forth, and thus less of it eventually reaching Seattle’s sheltered spot on Puget Sound. Instead, there were lots of grey, overcast days and light drizzling ones, but the measurable rain was moderate. In fact, the region generally has had plenty of rain to sustain, in its temperate climate, a stupendous variety of plants year-round, from the great towers of evergreen trees to their tiniest replicas in forest-like carpets of moss.
There were, as anyone anywhere knows, secrets and surprises in this unique climate. In the neighborhood where my grandparents had their apartment when I was young, right next to the shores of the Sound, I was awed by a few yards sporting healthy palm trees. These were not native to the northwest, nor even the slightest bit common—hence, my amazement at their exotic punctuation of the expected landscape—but they grew there without requiring any particular magic, because the microclimate along the West Seattle shoreline has remained remarkably sheltered and coddled by Mother Nature.
Now, it’s a more frequent phenomenon to see all sorts of semitropical plants creeping into the Seattle area landscape, and at the same time, more and more xeric plants. The hot weather of summer does, in reality, get a little hotter and stick around a little longer than it did in years past. It also tends to be drier. The total annual rainfall average hasn’t fallen into a chasm, but it’s creeping lower gradually, and this winter-spring cycle has been a record-setter for low snow pack, sending a fair number of ski resort owners into early and/or even permanent closure and more than a few homeowners into rethinking their home sprinkler systems and dispatching lawns in favor of water-saving raingardens. A few years down the road, it wouldn’t surprise me especially to see yards that look remarkably like the iconic ones of Las Vegas popping up on many northern properties as well.
Some of this change in nature’s attitude toward us is bound to change how we can and should live our lives. The watersheds that once supplied an abundance of cheap, readily available drinking and gardening water and hydroelectric power to wide swaths of the country are shrinking and already being bargained for more aggressively, even disputed. The world is already water-poor, despite newly over-watered and flooding regions, and I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if at some point water becomes the basis of more wars than oil and politico-religious reasons are today. I hope I’m not around to see the day.
Meanwhile, it’s still something of a novelty, never mind those long-ago days of perhaps two or three landmark palm trees in West Seattle, to see what’s happening in the gardens and seasons of this changing world. Never thought I’d see things the way they are, and that’s not just talking about the weather. Maybe I’ll get a grass skirt and celebrate it with a neon-colored summer drink served with its own paper mini-umbrella while it lasts.
My love for the maple tree may be a little too intense for polite company. I think it a fine and lovely specimen of arboreal beauty, an asset to the landscape worthy of great admiration and cultivation, to be sure. Its impressively dense, hard-hearted wood is a grand material for the builder, cabinetmaker, and other craftspeople who value its beauty and strength for the long-lived wonder of what can be built from it that lasts for many a generation. Maple trees provide not only shapely plants, much-needed shelter from all sorts of wind and sun and storms, and those delightful little propellers of seed that fill many an hour with wonder for the fortunate child who grows up under the spreading arms of such trees, but also, and this is the crux of today’s paean, they feed me and my fellow maple admirers: their sweet, delicious, delectable life’s-blood; their sap.
I am a sap for maple syrup. And sugar. And pretty nearly all things maple, except perhaps distinctly artificial maple flavors, because why on earth would I want the fake stuff when I’ve supped of the Real Deal? No namby-pamby Grade A syrup, either; I want the darkest, densest, most maple-y syrup I can get, and if I’m not actually eating something like the cute little maple sugar candy lobster pictured above (sigh!), I would just as soon that the sap I’m sipping is as richly maple flavored as it can be.
I had the privilege, tonight, of taking my dessert right in the midst of dinner, in the form of a maple-bourbon milkshake to go along with my seared albacore tuna and grilled salmon entrée. If you think that sounds like an odd pairing, I don’t blame you. But in my defense, I was faced with a fun-filled menu that required getting my sister to agree to splitting our two entrees to share what was already a tough narrowing-down to that number, and my spouse to share the milkshake so that I could still find room to devour all of these goodies in addition to the starter that said sibling and I had already divided, an equally incongruous but also fabulously yummy version of a Caprese salad comprising slices of the biggest, juiciest heirloom beefsteak tomato I have ever seen, lightly salted and peppered, layered with slivers of silky fresh mozzarella, fresh basil leaves, and a small wading pool of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Sometimes it’s just too hard to choose one or two things out of the mass of delights on offer, so one is forced to be outrageously excessive in both the quantity and variety of items in which one indulges. Sometimes, I just lean in that direction by nature.
And sometimes, I rejoice that Nature has forced me to fall into a stupor of maple-induced reverie and reverence that says it’s okay to munch on a lobster-shaped hunk of pure sugar until just this side of comatose. Or to drink a wildly sweet, maple-magicked milkshake right along with a mismatched but far from misbegotten dinner. You can decide for yourselves whether this is a criminal level of self-indulgence. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here in the shade of a big old tree, thinking sweet thoughts while I spin its little propellers around to spread the goodness that is maple forestry just a bit further on this earth.
Evening among the Stones
Under cedars, in the beeches
in the garden’s deepest reaches,
sing the crickets and the sparrows,
robins, and the draught that harrows
every hollow of the windy, wooded hill…
Where those sleepers are reclining,
and above their tombs, repining,
kneel the loves they left behind them,
who return here yet to find them
and commune again together, sweetly, still…
As the honeysuckle flowers
lull away the weary hours,
here all spirits, in communion
so with nature, find reunion
in the waning light of afternoons at ease…
With the daylight, sadness dimming
like this lake where swans go swimming
through the lilies as its silver
mirror dims, goes dark forever,
souls may meet again as often as they please…
Short bursts of breeze in the long leaves,
the slightest of eddies as though
their pulse were pumping actual red cells
through the tall margins of the field—
Likelier that their real nature as flammable,
short-lived bursts of vigorous and
violent life, destined to flame
up, out, leap to cosmic oblivion, and die—
Are these our guides, or are
they mirrors of the flimsy, volatile existence
that we share? Only there, in
the margins of the field, do the flames
and shadows of our being have
a moment’s sway, for better or for worse,
of honesty out in the sun. Only there,
where the grass grows tall and yet
has not the strength or
depth of root to thrive, do we
see how little of the energy
with which we’d credited ourselves
really shines for longer than
a short, weedy season, bending
this way, bending that, and sparking
into sudden flares of incandescent
death
before returning to earth,
extinguished without
having distinguished ourselves, yet still
flying a bold red flag as if
we were something more.
Just because something is beyond my understanding doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
Just because it defies convention doesn’t mean it Can’t Be Done.
Just because it surpasses my imagination doesn’t mean it’s unnatural and illogical.
Just because it seems superhuman doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Just because I’m small and insignificant and mortal doesn’t mean I shouldn’t seek deeper understanding, challenge my boundaries, learn from nature, investigate logic and the natural order of things, and
lean hard against the edges of
impossibility…
I don’t think it necessary to explain to you. That title…you know just what I mean. It’s summer here. All over the whole danged country, it’s summer; it’s hot, or the local equivalent of Hot wherever we are, and we’re a bit uncomfortable with it, most of us.
The solution is obvious. Cool it, my friends. Chilled food and drink save the day. Heck, they can save the whole week, when necessary. I love good cold eats and treats at any time, but especially so in hot weather.
And there are so many worthy options that it would be impossible to exhaust the inventory before the too-warm season ended. But I’m willing to try. Ice cream, sorbet, frozen fruit. Icy cold smoothies, Thai iced tea, lemonade, and cold, clear ice water. Gelato. Ahhh. You have my permission. You’re welcome.
It was a day of superb weather. As expected. It’s only that it was the kind of weather expected at entirely different times of the year, or at least in entirely different parts of the world. At least, by me.
In that way, it was par for the course in the modern world’s weather, at least. One doesn’t really know what lies ahead further than a few minutes, though now it’s less for the reason that weather forecasting is such an inexact art (it’s far less so than it used to be, anyhow) and more that previous centuries’ patterns have apparently been twisting and turning and emerging in wholly new directions and shapes. Exciting stuff, to be sure. Not so easy to manage our lives within it, given the difficulty of knowing whether the rain that’s begun requires a light, windbreaker sort of slicker or the building of an ark.
Meanwhile, superb weather at the “wrong” date and place.
One could spend plenty of time and energy trying to figure out why, or what it might mean in the grand scheme of things, and surely, thousands of smarter people have done so. I am not the one to solve those puzzles. I went for a walk, enjoyed the superb weather, and when it grew too hot for my taste, found a few trees in whose shade I could continue to enjoy the weather without being quite so warm.
It’s a weird world, this, and not quite like the one I thought I’d known all these years. But it still has some mighty nice shade trees here and there, and if I’m not too silly to take advantage of those, I can still think of it as a great home planet. Works for me.
Since I missed yesterday’s posting time altogether and admitted [what you already know full well, if you know me in the least] today to my craving for massive amounts of sleep, I am grateful that today was a quiet, calm, fairly uneventful one spent recuperating from the latest adventures. And, more than that, grateful that it’s just about bedtime again. I seldom feel any sadness that any day is drawing to a close, other than the sentimental sense that a current delightful activity or gathering of friends must needs be discontinued, even if temporarily, for me to head toward sleep. So I am quite contented just now. Mother Nature has turned out the lights. I shall, too.
Art-Colored Glasses 