Waves on the inner harbor of Honfleur (taken by Leslie)
I have been mostly deaf all of my life, so I pay more attention to sound waves than may be healthy.
For the same reason, I pay way too much attention to light waves as I stare at people’s lips as they talk.
I talk with the universal accent of the congenitally deaf, and a big piece of my learning how to talk was touching the throat of my mother as she taught me the various sounds people make when speaking English.
Waves in the Cape May inlet
I learned most of them, but I’m still struggling with “r”. Grrrr….
Waves allow us to know what’s going on with the things not actually touching us. (Well, sound waves are mechanical, so I guess one could argue that the air particles need to touch our ear drum, but the particles are not the wave.)
Basil flower on a winter windowsill
We do not observe waves directly–we see what our brains allow us to see, forms and sounds that keep our breathing bodies from quickly becoming carcasses.
Still, as I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow glinting in the optimistic light of a March sun, my eye converting waves of light that only I have seen, I realize how little any of us can know, and how much of the universe casually exists outside our senses, our imagination.
So I write about it, to no one in particular, for no particular reason.
Bee on a dandelion….the cherry blossoms are still a month away
If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, or by us.
We cannot know what bees know, but if I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I’m throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.
After giving myself to the first cherry tree blossom of spring, I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2–she carried her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. She may have seen me do the same thing.
The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: “There may be bees in those flowers–get away!”
She slinked away, now fearful of bees and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose–a child in love with flowers and bugs is going to have her heart broken when she earns what is expected of her later.
Crocus breaking through the frozen ground
Not all things are possible, but these things are:
You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.
You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.
You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.
You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.
You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.
You can bury your face in early spring cherry blossoms.
You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.
Winter basil on the windowsill.
What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?
Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?
Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?
Monarch on my finger, late autumn at Two Mile Beach
My Dad is dead. He loved bees. My Mom is dead. She loved bees. My sister is dead. She loved bees. I will someday be dead. I love bees.
Maybe it’s the bees that are killing us. Maybe it’s not. But if it is, I’d still love the bees.
Spine of a dead and decaying horseshoe crab. My reminder.
Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.
The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter–she died two days later, while I held her hand.
The last few hours of my Dad’s life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.
I did not hold my sister’s hand–she was killed by an errant Christian missionary who left her broken on the edge of a Michigan highway–but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always.
February is still here, hanging on as it does, but the light has changed.
February comes from a word meaning “the purging”, and was long the last month for the Romans, occasionally followed by Mercedonius, a month (of sorts) tucked into the calendar to get the calendar back in sync with the seasons.
While we mark our time in chunks set by people who lived a long time ago, people who knew nothing of this side of the Atlantic Ocean, the ancient souls in our ancient brains know the light has changed.
So does the life around us.
The geese are back, the crocus spear through the frozen earth, and the squash from last summer are getting soft.
Last summer’s fruit, this spring’s seeds.
I keep planting, I keep brewing, I keep playing my guitar badly, and I keep getting older. Something has to give.
And it will, but that’s all right. My molecules are vibrating as I breathe, and they will keep vibrating when I die, in one form or another.
(That’s not a metaphor, it’s how the universe works.)
My uke, not my guitar–I’m even worse on the uke.
I just came back from visiting my almost 3 month old grand-daughter. She laughs because that’s what humans do. And eventually I need to get out of her way. And I will.
In the meantime I will continue to sow, to harvest, to cull, to peel, to cut, to cook, to eat.
