These Flying, Beating Things

This morning the air was so warm and the day so bright I felt like beating my chest and screaming wildly into the blue sky.

I buckled the girls into the car, gave a little hop of ecstacy before I climbed behind the steering wheel. Then we drove into the country. The windows were down, country music cranked up, and I felt like I was seventeen. Since I lost my way to our destination (as usual), we had opportunity to enjoy the country even more. Our merriment was not dampened in the least by the manuveering we had to do in other people's driveways. There was nobody else on the road; the hills rolled all around us like greening ocean waves. . .the sky seemed to be whistling like Bing Crosby in "Brigadoon" and we were exploding with it all: IT'S ALMOST LIKE BEIN IN LOVE!

Our friend's house is situated on a green ridge with a thick bank of evergreens on one side. Every angle of their land has a stunning view down to a valley and then to more wooded hills; the wind rushes through the trees until you forget who you are in their music.

I love trees. In Arizona beneath a stunning blue sky, I actually stood against a tree, holding the bark in my hands in an embrace. The bark felt like the hardened skin of some mythical creature whose back I might climb on, who might at any moment jump into the air and take me sailing through the sky.

Our friends have a real corker of a tree, a huge weeping willow with an immense trunk forked close to the ground. "We decided if the tree ever dies then we'll have to move," said my friend. The tree stands in their yard like a silent grandfather. He has grown there for years, and the yard belongs to him.

We had a delightful visit; it was so pleasant to be in somebody else's home and enjoy the warmth that a good family generates into their own setting. We ate apple bread and the girls disappeared to pursuits of their own. We talked about books and that was warming, too. Books are like trees, and it's appropriate they are one and the same at origin; both are alive and both are present and living whether you are there to look at them or not.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It was raining when we left. The ground smelled rich and the air was soft. As I rounded a corner to reach home, a doe galloped down the hill and stopped just short of our car. In the distance, when they are grazing bucolically on a hillside, deer look delicate. When one is charging down a slope toward your car, what impresses you are the muscles rippling through their body; their quivering force; the magnitude of their aliveness. With beating heart I watched the doe in the rearview mirror as she picked her way along the side of the road. In the mirror she looked small and gentle again.

As we pulled into our driveway, a cloud of blackbirds swelled up from our lawn to fill a huge maple.

These rushings, these risings, these liftings and beatings.

S P R I N G!

* * * *
I can't help but think of Gerard Manley Hopkin's wonderful poem, God's Grandeur:


The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.