April 25th

 

The world given over to gray skies and faint wind for the afternoon, it helps to walk along the river with its two-foot, sandy cliffs and attempt to move at the same calm pace of the water.  One's mind goes fluid quite naturally and the feet try their best to gracefully flow over the granite sand still wet from melted snow and around the skeletal stalks of last season's flowers and faded grass.  This early in the spring, only the lupines are fully green, those plants which give more than they need to take.  Opened already in symmetric bursts of cupped leaves, many have kept to them pure droplets of snowmelt held at their centers, raised up and gleaming, even in the dull overcast light.

I don't always know what it is that keeps me walking or what keeps this love of the world held to its faithful, eddying ripple on its surrendering course.

But, just there, at a river bend, part of the soil has broken off and fallen into that gentle, insistent current taking with it half a colony of lupines caught in mid-tumble.  Held under that clear, dark weight, with roots still in the soil, they continue to respire.  And so little bubbles cling to the sunken leaves with their own supernal luster.

And I do not know why it never occurred to me then that those lupines might be saved or whether I could have done anything for them at all.  I do not know why I walked on to sit in the sand by the shore and watch the gulls huddled up against the chill breeze and lake waves.  Nor why I should have seen, on the way back, a wind-hovering kestrel, bobbing in place against the current of winds, hunting high above the marsh and held in what seemed like the center of the sky.  He flew on without striking, talons empty in the grey evening air.  And it seemed a strange counterpoint both to those lupines which remained sunken and freezing and those still above and offering their jewels. 

What is it, in the world, that holds each of us so differently in the same arms?