I arrived at Stacy Boulevard an hour before sunrise one chilly morning last week, intent on a brief walk to test my twisted knee. As soon as I parked my car and began trudging along the iron railing of the holding wall that hugs the water, I sensed that something astonishing would happen, and something did.
The sky above the harbor was a cold gray, lit by the first light of day, and there was a huge expanse of smokey mackerel cloud stretched across it. I usually walk with eyes cast down so as not to trip, but my eyes were drawn up to a sudden movement in the sky. Rising silently in a perfect "V" formation were 60 ducks flying northeast, their flight taking them across the path of the pale yellow crescent moon.
I stopped in my tracks, stunned by this unspeakable, dazzling composition of nature. There was no one with whom to share the spectacle; only one other person was walking this early, and she was a good distance away, traveling in the other direction. There was nothing to do but behold the sight, commit it to memory. Then as suddenly as it came, it was gone; the clouds enveloped the birds and the sky above me fell back into stillness. I've heard it said that each instant of your life is a place you've never been.
There was a lesson in this instant for me. I always want to write things down in a notebook, save them in a folder, cling to them. If I wanted this memory, there was not time for that. Instead, I had to surrender to the moment, and when I did that, the recollection was so vivid I knew it would last for my "forever," however long that was.
I forgot about my knee pain, so utterly erased from my mind were all complaints human. In that moment, the birds, the sky, the moon in their glorious juxtaposition had lifted me to another level, a level where I don't spend a lot of time because I'm busy writing things down and putting them in folders.
It was a lovely start to my day, and called a question to mind: "How much good stuff do I miss because I'm looking down to avoid tripping when I walk?" The answer was, "Probably a lot," but that response was tempered by the fact that failure to look down was how I twisted my knee in the first place. What a lot of muddling occurs in the human condition. As my friend Judy so often says: "Oh, well." Things have to be measured within the context of each day.
When I returned home, still early in the morning, I settled in a chair by the window with a book I treasure, one I got for free. "Potted Gardens," by Rebecca Cole is full of lush photographs and tips on gardening. It came to me many years ago, the surprising result of a Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce promotion in which local merchants offered items to be won in participating shops on a particular springtime evening.
My name landed among others in the "fishbowl" at The Bookstore (for I am their customer as they are mine). But I never win anything; had never won anything; never expect to win anything. So when they called me to say I had won a gardening book, I remember feeling disproportionately thrilled.
I read the book all the time, a paragraph here, a page there. It's a book subtitled, "A Fresh Approach to Container Gardening" — which it is, but it's more. It's a philosophy of gardening, specifically targeting those who are confined by city living or otherwise limited outdoor space for gardening. Cole concludes that, "A garden is an ostentatious affirmation of the cycle of life and death."
My mind reeled back to the ducks' arrow of flight superimposed on the early morning moon just an hour earlier. It would be a comfortable fit to replace "garden" with the trilogy of "clouds, ducks, moon," in Cole's succinct declaration of all that a garden represents.
Isn't it there, in such affirmations of the cycles of life, that we humans feel most comfortable, most right with our souls? The ducks got off to an early start that morning in their continued migration north, to cooler regions, for the coming summer, and we could surely count on a similar check of them when they pass over our harbor again in autumn to return south for the winter.
The appearance of green things pushing their way through the warmed brown earth that was not so long ago frozen and blanketed with snow makes our hearts rejoice with yearning for the miracle of seeds giving way to plants and flowers, for the miracle of leaves unfolding to cover the outstretched, bare branches of the trees.
It's the comfort of expecting and welcoming and watching these passages in nature that center us in our own world, that affirm our own cycles of life and death, and that confirm that we are not creatures apart, but rather a part of it all.
Later in the day, on my way to work, I drove past a neatly piled array of someone's trash. It contained, among barrels and other things stuck with the bright pink badges of our commitment to spring cleaning, the disassembled parts of a baby's crib. I slowed down to survey the spoils. "Can't recycle that crib?" I asked the guy who was still adding to his pile.
"No," he grimaced thoughtfully. "It had its time. It went through a lot of babies. I didn't want to take something over to "Second Glance" that might no longer be safe for someone else's baby."
Ah! Fair game, I thought, remembering Rebecca Cole's chapter on the thrill of finding old, beat-up things in antique stores or discarded remnants in other people's trash to which she might add plants or flowers, thereby assigning them another life. The metal underpinning to the crib mattress looked to be about the length of the window box outside of my shop. "Do you mind if I take that piece?"
"No, so long as you're not going to put a baby on it."
"It just looks like a good trellis for my climbing nasturtiums."
"Go for it," he said, and pulled it out of the rubble for me.
So now it's wedged between the brick wall and the window box — no longer junk, but something with the pride of purpose. Any day now, the tiny green sprouts will come up out of the potting soil, reach up for some support, then grow like crazy, wrapping their fierce little tendrils around the piece of the crib that held the mattress that held the baby who grew too big for the crib.
It was blessed affirmation that not only springtime, but other things as well, keep going round and round and round.
nnn
Susan S. Emerson is a regular Times columnist.
