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And since to look on things in bloom/ Fifty years is little room
One reason I don't get much read these last months is that the weather has been splendid. I mean it's rained not a little-- it was raining last Thursday, and the one before that, and though it didn't rain three weeks ago, the next day it poured. But when it's not doing that it's comfortably cool, and of course light till past nine: and so I walk about the neighbourhood in the evenings and look at the yuppies' and muppies' and retired Italians' gardens, which are well worth looking at.
On my street a honeysuckle vine has wrapped itself halfway up a concrete street light, and the smell is heavenly; two blocks over it's a Sleeping Beauty rose hedge. There are Martian flowers I cannot name, like the something that grows into a purple sphere but empty at the centre. The peonies and ajisai- what's that in English? right, hydrangeas- are coming out and should burst forth in the coming week's heat. Of course, the coming week's heat will probably drive me back indoors, to the comfort of the fan if not the AC; and then I shall read more. (Like last year, doggedly reading my way through Brust and Griffin and Carey until the heat of July cancelled all memory of what I did.)
Except the other reason I don't read is that my embroidering skills have advanced to the point that my efforts now look respectable, and so I spend an hour of my evenings embroidering quasi-roses and pseudo-lilacs over bleach stains and tiny holes.
I was in a taking about something yesterday-- malignant juxtaposition of several angsts, one of which is teeth. Usually I read Buddhist textbooks for this, but they weren't helping. So I vacuumed the living room and hallway, scrubbed unreachable parts of the kitchen floor, washed the stairs, picked up unripe plums and bird-pecked cherries in the garden (a bumper crop year again, alas) and trimmed the overgrown hedge: sensibly in the cool, instead of waiting for next week's heat as I normally do. And as ever, it worked like a charm; and as ever, this strikes me as All Wrong.
On my street a honeysuckle vine has wrapped itself halfway up a concrete street light, and the smell is heavenly; two blocks over it's a Sleeping Beauty rose hedge. There are Martian flowers I cannot name, like the something that grows into a purple sphere but empty at the centre. The peonies and ajisai- what's that in English? right, hydrangeas- are coming out and should burst forth in the coming week's heat. Of course, the coming week's heat will probably drive me back indoors, to the comfort of the fan if not the AC; and then I shall read more. (Like last year, doggedly reading my way through Brust and Griffin and Carey until the heat of July cancelled all memory of what I did.)
Except the other reason I don't read is that my embroidering skills have advanced to the point that my efforts now look respectable, and so I spend an hour of my evenings embroidering quasi-roses and pseudo-lilacs over bleach stains and tiny holes.
I was in a taking about something yesterday-- malignant juxtaposition of several angsts, one of which is teeth. Usually I read Buddhist textbooks for this, but they weren't helping. So I vacuumed the living room and hallway, scrubbed unreachable parts of the kitchen floor, washed the stairs, picked up unripe plums and bird-pecked cherries in the garden (a bumper crop year again, alas) and trimmed the overgrown hedge: sensibly in the cool, instead of waiting for next week's heat as I normally do. And as ever, it worked like a charm; and as ever, this strikes me as All Wrong.
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You have titled this with one of my favorite poems, which I associate strongly with my late father (I read it at his funeral).
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He was fond of "A Shropshire Lad" and introduced it to me. That poem always made me think of him: when I was small, in the spring, we'd always go for a walk in Rock Creek Park (a long, rambling park that follows the natural course of a good-sized stream - a tributary of the Potomac River - roughly north to south through Washington, DC: part of it is about a quarter mile from the house in which I grew up), and he would note all the early spring plants and flowers that were coming out: skunk cabbage was the earliest, then bloodroot, maypops, spring beauties, etc.
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(ONE DAY I will make it to the friggin cherry blossoms in the tidal basin. Preferably while I'm still a DC resident, even.)
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:-D
I usually just admire the cherry blossoms around our neighborhood. The part near the Tidal Basin always gets overrun with visitors form out of town.
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