Perfect Days

We had beautiful, unusually mild Easter weekend weather. Mild, room-temperature weather continued Monday and Tuesday with a prediction of eighty degrees tomorrow. Suddenly, though it won’t last – it can’t: that’s the definition of April – we’re in the Other Place. You wake up in full sunlight, you get out of bed without turning the heat up, you look out the window right away. You find some reason why you have to go out of doors before breakfast; possibly before anything.
The Other Place has its own routines in the garden. You step outside without looking at the thermometer first, without thinking what to wear, and you go not to get the paper but to see what news the earth has warmed up. You check to see if anything new is blooming. Or if the light is doing something different when it brings out the color of the scattering of bluets (little sky-blue bulb growers), which appear to have done some work spreading themselves around without much assistance from humankind. The grape hyacinth had grown shapelier and may even be preparing to open in some unpromising territory under the maple tree before too long.
The green spears of the day lilies – those woodsy New England leaves of grass – have grown greener, richer, more prosperous looking every day. They don’t bloom for months, but they begin to be a presence in March, long before many of the spring bloomers have any appearance.
So in the last few days, taking advantage of the weekend, we have undressed the garden of its brown winter wear – all those dried brown tree leaves which the garden wears like a shabby brown coat, worn out by the weather. The garden has been sleeping rough, under rags on a bench. The rags kept it warn. Now it wriggles out; stretches fingers and toes in the smiling air.
Tabulations: About a dozen to fifteen big brown leaf bags filled up and scattered around the yard, some lined up against the front porch, some stationed near collection areas in the back and side.
New blossoms: The weeping cherry tree bloomed full-white today. It was halfway there yesterday. You could see the blossoms, unopened, on the branches a few days before Thursday when I was looking at it with Anne’s parents. Stay a few more days, I said, and you’ll see it bloom.
A few more vinca flowers, looking purple along the blue granite flagstone walk.
A few bluets – that’s what I’m calling them; tiny bulbs making light blue flowers with thin, star-like petals, in the side yard.
A couple of photos: the cherry tree, the day lilies, the first round of purple vinca in front of the Adirondack chairs.

Poetry in flower

My Plymouth Library friends are reminding everyone that April is poetry month. They’ve got the right month – the poets have put April in the language. One of the few passages I was ever asked to memorize, the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, puts April in the first line: “Whan that Aprill with its shoures soute/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour/ of which vertu engendred is the flour…”
I remember how to say the Middle English, but not how to spell it, so I looked up the spellings. The modern English goes something like: When April with its sweet showers, the drought of March has pierced to the root, and bathed every leaf in the liquid whose goodness makes the flowers…
I also remember our professor calling our attention to Chaucer’s evocation of the “droghte”of March, an ironical notion in view of recent circumstances. But ironical to Chaucer, too. There is no meteorological drought in March, then or now. Chaucer was talking about the spiritual dryness that comes from too much winter – April puts an end to that, on its better days at least.
“So,” Chaucer concludes that first passage, “piketh hem Nature in hir corages/ Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…”
When nature awakens our hearts, that’s when we go on pilgrimages.
April brings a new season, spring – time for us to go on our pilgrimages.
People change their wardrobe and get outdoors any way possible, walking the dog, shooting hoops, flooding Boston Common. Anne and I spend all Saturday clearing dead leaves and last year’s growth off the back garden, revealing a whole lot of green, some purple vinca flowers, a few hidden bulbs, and the first green shoots of scores of other plants that will unfold their nature over time.
After Chaucer, April shows up all over the map. Eliot famously called it “the cruelest month.” Cummings (“April is a perhaps hand”) and Frost approach the month’s changeability: “You know how it is on an April day/ When the sun is out and the wind is still/ You’re one month on in the middle of May./But if you so much as dare to speak,/ A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,/A wind comes off a frozen peak/, And you’re two months back in the middle of March.”
But in April even raw, rainy spells make us think of flowers. And flowers make us think of the mixed blessings of our own nature.
In the “Immortality Ode,” which is really about reconciling ourselves to mortality, Wordsworth saves his finest bloom for the great nature-loving poem’s last lines:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears.
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

After the Flood

We had a new season this year – flood month. The Great Spring Flood of 2010 came March 13 to15. We struggled through the rain to go to a Sunday afternoon concert in Boston, walking the rain-splattered streets and thinking that wearing wet clothes was the worst of it. We came back to find six inches of water in the basement. We spend a week clearing soaked stuff out of the basement.
I lay the pages of damp photo albums on newspaper on the living room floor in a flood reclamation project that is still going on by fits and starts. I worry about sorting through the hundreds of pics from our Lebanon trip to get them in some condition to share with friends. I suffer from a stomach bug for weeks, watching what I eat (a rarity for me) and husbanding my energy for work.
I try to love the spring.
The day after the rain finally stops, the sun comes out, the temperature warms, and spring fever breaks out in the Massachusetts masses. Shortsleeves; shorts. Smiles. Our crocuses break through the brown leaf and muck crust, but the back garden – my daily companion because I stare at it, at least a sliver of it, from my desk – still looks like the Lower Ninth Ward after Katrina.
So I’m still not in tune with the universe, and am disappointed with myself because early spring has been a favorite part of the garden experience in other years. Because it changes every day.
This week we wrap up our second major rain event (less dramatically for us, thank-you weather gods) and when the sun comes out on Thursday peace and harmony once more rule the land. Anne’s parents and I step outdoors for a walk at Wollaston Beach. They’ve been unable to go home to New York City for two days because the rain washed out the train tracks in Rhode Island. (Oh, did I forget to mention that other little change the flood season made in our schedule?)
As we go to the car, I glance at a little spot of bare earth in front of the 50-year rhododendron bush and see the round hats of the first violet leaves emerging. The leaves are actually heart-shaped, but when small and newly out of the ground they look round – little green mouths drinking up the sun. They were not there – nothing was there – the last time I looked at this spot last – if not the day before, no more than two or three. And here they are.
This is what I have been missing.
Other plants are up, of course. The crocuses have already blown and dropped. The lavender is drawing the color back into its leaves. Sedum leaves look green and plump already. But I had forgotten about that bare piece of ground where I introduced the violets a year or two ago: violets, this is ground. Ground, violets.
The things you forget about in order, so it seems, to discover them again. That’s the best part of spring.

Balcony Garden

The Lebanese are shocked if someone builds a dwelling place without a balcony. In warm weather, most of the year, people live on their balcony, and all year round they leave their plants out. Many buildings in Beirut have deep dirt-filled planters built into the balconies. The result is thick vines of purple bougainvillea, jasmine and verbena grown all over the city.
Our daughter Sonya’s apartment in Beirut, where we camped out on her life for two weeks, has two balconies. The “big one,” with its wide, dense, busy viewspace offering close perspectives on several construction projects and lots of smaller, older Mediterranean style buildings, is also home to a dozen or so flowering plants. Planted in large pots from which vines emerge, climb walls on homemade lattices and twist around one another, bougainvillea and jasmine offer the biggest shows. Since it was February when we were there, the bougainvillea was beginning to offer a few cheerful blossoms. Herbs, annuals and other perennials were still awaiting their hour.
The neighbors in the lower house across a narrow street but more or less in front and center from the balcony where we sat and watched the world were already preparing for the new growing season. Their garden occupied much of a broad, flat rooftop, consisting of maybe thirty large pots and a few small trees. Many of the pots had severely pruned rootstock with short stems of what could only be rose bushes protruding above the soil. We watch them walk among their plants, conferring.
They see us.
Both parties wave.
A day later a huge conical pile of yellowish dirt appears on an unoccupied piece of the fourth-story roof. Since we were not out of bed early enough to be in good balcony-spying position whenever this dirt arrived, we can only speculate on its source and means of arrival. Helicopter? Considerable huffing and puffing up the stairs by poorly paid sherpas? Family members from “the village” (all Beruitis have a village, where growing is practiced) arriving with a truckful of this precious ultimate source of new life? Magic?
Howsoever it got there, the appearance of the yellow dirt ushered in a new era of re-potting, the shaking of old dirt off old roots, the summary disposal of unwanted plant material and other stuff over the side of the building, and the reinstallation of the fortunate neighbors’ balcony garden in its new soil.
Inspired, some days later we took action on our own front.
Owning to an unfortunate water shortage last summer (when you leave home in August you are relying on a substitute plant attendant, who in this instance did not attend well or faithfully), one of Sonya’s large, many-branched plants had died. So it was that Anne and I were pressed into service as visiting workers. We tracked down the dead branches, disentangled them from the living neighbors, and cut off about two garbage bags worth of dead vines.
The neighboring climbing plants shed a lot of deadwood also. The jasmine lost most of its upper stories, and I put in some time tying up and styling the low, new-growth green shoots, borrowing twine from the lattice work to wrap up these young branches and encourage them upward. Onward and upward with the art of balcony gardening!
Many other potted plants – from old ferns to new sweet alyssum – need repotting. Later that day, then, we tackled the challenge of finding garden soil in a densely built city. The obstacles: we didn’t have a car. Friends having a car were too far away, or had valid excuses: jobs, babies, lives of their own. We wanted to sight-see around the city on foot, but not carry bags of dirt while we did it. Nobody in the neighborhood sold dirt. In fact even by Lebanese standards, it was too early to sell plants.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we took a cab ride to a “department store,” an usual establishment in a distant neighborhood, whose Dubai owners had recently taken over from local owners, meaning that the store’s fabulous French food service had been replaced by an American fast-food franchise (people in Dubai apparently not knowing any better). Just as in a Wal-Mart there was a gardening section, where we bought a couple of manageable bags of potting soil, a bottle of water soluble fertilizer, and a metal fork for poking at compacted soil in the pots of balcony gardens. We took them home in a taxi. Taxi fare in Beirut is sixty-seven cents per person. Bags of soil ride free.
We held our own little happy, messy re-potting party a few days later. Sonya’s housecleaner cleaned up. Anne and I await news updates on the success of our efforts.

Walking Shoes

Bring your walking shoes to Beirut. The city is better than a movie. All of the natives walk the Corniche, the seaside promenade that runs from commercial port downtown all along the harbor, past cafes, yacht clubs, military posts, an amusement park, beach clubs built into rocks, and the gigantic weather-carved boulders known as the Pigeon Rocks. Locals climb out on the rocks to fish or swim. Visitors are wise to stay on the broad pavement of the Corniche and watch the action. Cyclists, couples, women in loose headscarfs, girls who wear the more fully covering “conservative” head-and-neck scarf over form-fitting sheath dresses and jeans. Men exulting over fast-played backgammon contests. One evening’s two-minute Hezbollah vehicle caravan demonstration – people drive slowly, wave flags and yell out of car windows. (This in response to the recent memorial for Rafik Harriri.) Pushcart food sellers, including some selling roasted ears of corn on sticks – an outdoor treat here the way pretzels are in America.
Beirut is bustling with a building boom, but below the yellow construction cranes people still live the Mediterranean lifestyle on the sidewalks, the cafes and the restaurants. A personal, highly interactive, down-to-earth city with busy streets, steady pedestrian traffic, and an endless variety of little stores, fashion boutiques, and upscale galleries. In Lebanon, the owners of the mom and pop groceries want to meet your mother, and your daughter’s Palestinian refugee friend brings you a “welcome” gift. In Lebanon, your boss invites your parents to her home for dinner, and in this country there is no such thing as a quick, easy (or early) dinner. In Lebanon, the bus always waits for you. In fact drivers stop on the odd chance that pedestrians might want to hop on and go back to Beirut. You don’t have to look for a taxi, taxis look for you, prowling the busy streets and beeping at people who look like foreigners. Somehow they can tell.
Attractions that might be hard to get close to, too crowded or expensive in other countries are cheap and accessible – probably too accessible – in Lebanon. Spectacular Roman and Byzantine ruins can be visited in the coastal cities of Tyre and Byblos. Touch the columns, sit on the stones, climb through the weathered remains of amphitheatres and extensive Roman baths. No fences keep you from climbing down into the burial caverns. When you walk the battlements and towers of the Crusader fortresses in Sidon and Tripoli no railings tell you how far to go. Nothing keeps you from climbing out to stare at the spectacular rooftop views of the hillsides of Tripoli where every inch has been built on. In Lebanon, they’ve never heard of liability.
In Beirut, neighborhood store owners without much English go out of their way to serve you. People stop you in the street if you’re looking at a map: “Do you want Hamra?” Gathering point for the city’s intellectuals in the years before the civil war, Hamra has become newly fashionably – the hot district for clubs, bars and late night life. The bars serve freshly squeezed blood orange juice and vodka cocktails.
There are no morality police in Lebanon.
The high standards of food preparation in restaurants and shops – even the fast food is good – is based on fresh produce picked that morning in the country’s fertile regions and trucked to the cities. An array of citrus varieties (six kinds of oranges) were ripe in February; also bananas grown along the coastal road south to Tyre; avocadoes, mangoes, snap beans, egg plant, zucchinis with their blossoms still one them, potatoes, tomatoes.
In Lebanon there are lots of cars, everyone drives as fast as they can, honks frequently, pulls into traffic without a second thought, and yet somehow watches out for all the other drivers, knowing they operate by the same rules, which are no rules by American standards.
I have vowed never to get behind the wheel of a car in Lebanon. Besides, walking is too much fun.

Wall garden

The snow had grown stale. Most of it was gone, and only the places where the snow had been piled up after shoveling or plowing had more than a granulated plastic-looking skin. And even those bigger piles of snow were dirty. It was human-generated dirt. It came from car exhaust and dirt in the air, pollution; the scatter-shot, spot-pocked, melt-mottled surfaces of the re-frozen snow piles glazed by road salt or sand.
The garbage that had been there when the snow fell, or was added by the road crews after it had begun, was still around. Dog messes, litter, cigarette butts.
It was all the winter days I had ever known in one. Not the special, or magical, or “beautiful” ones that come with fresh snow. No sleigh bells. Sleigh bells only happened in commercials. There were cars, but not a steady stream.
Mostly there was nothing. Some moisture in the air, the temperature hovering a degree or two over freezing. Skies gray. The smell, if you could call it that – it wasn’t the smells you get at other times of years, the smell of things growing, or earth unfreezing in the spring, or dried leaves covering the ground in the fall – was more like the wet asphalt smell you get when a rain first starts, or after it ends. But there was something else to it – a bitter, acrid smell.
It was the odor of last days, holding on and digging in – embittered, abandoned, let down by the way things had turned out. The peculiar odor of old snow on urban streets, making a kind of grim last stand.
I’ve had days like that. I recognized the feeling. A lot of days that were gray, a little too cold, nothing exceptional either way, and nothing happening. Something would happen eventually. But not today; and not tomorrow either…
I take my garden fantasies indoors. I make a garden on my walls.
I had some photos up already. Not our photos. (Though we did make a calendar this year. That one’s hanging in the kitchen.) I worked with other calendars, old ones, which offered beautiful landscape shots for each month. Not necessarily New England seasonal landscapes. Japanese gardens; Mediterranean gardens.
I cut the photos out and pinned them to my color-starved walls. So now my color-starved eyes have something new to look at. I have grown pink-flowering cherry trees and orange-leafed maples on the walls of the study.
Just a few, I tell myself. Don’t overdo it. To help the mind bloom in winter.

Their ears should be burning

Robert J. Lurtsema must be spinning in his grave.
Somehow the angry howl of classical music lovers who found all their favorite programming dumped by the radio station they supported with years of tax-deductible donations hasn’t reached the tin ears of the WGBH’s corporate managers. Maybe they need an HD outrage receiver to hear what the station’s loyal, dues-members have been saying about their format change.
Over four hundred people attended a forum last month on the question “What Can We do for Classical Music Radio in Boston?” The answer almost everyone who packed the pews of the Old South Church would offer is "put it back on GBH!" Boston’s oldest public radio station dumped its music programming last month in favor of a news and talk format that mimics but falls short of WBUR’s. If you want non-stop news and talk, there are plenty of places to go. If you want classical music you must now – by fiat of GBH’s management – go to WCRB.
Only you probably can’t, because CRB’s signal (beamed from Lowell) is too weak to be heard in much of Boston, the entire South Shore, and all points beyond – wiping out classical radio for thousands of households where GBH’s famously strong signal is a New England treasure. Holy Fathers in Taunton found themselves excommunicated by GBH. Disabled seniors in Auburndale were deprived of the daily companionship of the music which speaks to their souls.
Classical music lovers, many of whom have listened to the station’s first-rate programming since Lurtsema began Morning Pro Musica in 1971 (or longer) discovered that their so-called “membership” in GBH meant nothing. As “members” we made annual contributions to the station’s upkeep. But management failed to consider our interests or consult our opinions when it decided to banish classical to CRB’s radio signal Siberia.
Many such listeners – or former listeners – packed the Old South Church forum, and about three-quarters of the house raised our hands when asked how many of us could not receive CRB’s signal. Listeners told GBH’s radio general manager John Voci (a forum panelist) that his station has forgotten both its mission and its identity. GBH’s management, they pointed out, was now using Arbitron ratings to justify its program decisions just like any commercial station. A woman from Roslindale who told Voci she felt “abandoned” by GBH drew little comfort from his advice that she could listen to the station’s stream on computer. She didn’t have a computer.
Even those who can tune in CRB aren’t happy with what they’re hearing. The new non-commercial CRB is too much like the old commercial CRB, playing single movements of symphonies, relying on a narrow playlist of classical’s top 50, and dropping the live in-studio performances by talented, young, otherwise seldom heard performers that GBH’s new, expensive, completely unnecessary studio was supposed to be for.
GBH’s seven-hours-a-day classical programming was educational, listeners said, it was a service, it furthered Boston’s vibrant musical culture, it was a daily presence in thousands of households. The station’s news and information mission was more than adequately carried out by its morning news show, its drive-time All Things Considered and The World shows. Why, GBH members wanted to know, did the station have to cut out its heart?
Adding insult to injury, the spin GBH puts on this cruelest cut drives listeners like myself positively over the edge. The station’s happy talk promos keep bragging that GBH has “saved” Boston’s only all-classical station by purchasing CRB. To classical music lovers that’s like firebombing Boston to save Nut Island. Then they ask us for money.
Voci let drop the real reason for the change when he dismissed an appeal for just a little bitty taste of classical on GBH. “It’s a business,” he responded. Well, no, it’s a nonprofit educational organization. Businesses don’t ask people to donate their money. A station determined to operate like a commercial, for-profit radio station has no right to its non-profit status and no reason to be considered a “public” station at all.
I’m afraid that what Mr. Vocci is really saying is that classical music fans are old and will only get older and that as soon as they’re out of the picture altogether in GBH’s business plan the better things will be for the bottom line. But I wonder if management has calculated on a rapid withdrawal of support by a core membership.
My wife tore up her membership card and mailed it back to GBH with a suitably scathing letter of resignation. Maybe if other listeners withhold all contributions until classical music comes back to GBH, management will figure out how to tune us in.