Timing? Time? Something Else?

This past week the timing has been right for black locust perfume in the air

Sometimes timing is everything. Other times, as the Artist said so often, it’s lighting that makes all the difference. Then of course (for restaurants and retail stores) there is “Location, location, location!” and (with rare books, especially), “Condition, condition, condition!” This past weekend, fortuitously, my timing was perfect for planting on Saturday evening perennials purchased that morning at the Northport Women’s Club’s first perennial sale, which I hope will become an annual event. 

Beautiful aliens, I can't help loving them.

 

Earlier in the week we were promised three straight days of rain – Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – with the 10-day forecast showing rain for every daylight hour those three days. By Saturday, however, the chances had thinned out, and only one measly hour was showing rain for Sunday morning. We need rain so badly! But I had gotten my three new iris (white), three lady’s mantle, and three pots of Shasta daisy plants (more than three plants in those pots) into the ground on Saturday evening, although it meant moving a few other things first and preparing soil in one new place to accomplish the task. They don’t look like much yet but will, I’m confident, be splendid additions to my outdoor surroundings. For now, iris and annuals provide lively color.

And then, Sunday morning – beautifully overcast, with a very gentle rain falling like a Sabbath benediction. Everything green seemed to be taking deep, happy breaths of cool, moist air. A perfect day for me to stay inside, vacuum floors, clear away clutter, make a pot of chili, and take reading breaks as needed. – Oh, yes, and breaks to throw tennis balls for Sunny Juliet, of course.

Busy in Northport bookstore and gallery and outdoors at home with dog and yard, I’ve been in drifting mode lately with my reading. My dinner companion on the porch most evenings is one of Jim Harrison’s novels in a French translation (strange to read the northern Michigan town and road names in such a different-feeling context!), and my Audubon Society wildflower guide is next to that novel on the table, as I have reason to consult it on a fairly regularly basis at this time of year as I consider what else to include in a planned wildflower area between barn and chicken coop. 

 

Next to my bed are Tom Springer’s The Star in the Sycamore: Discovering Nature’s Hidden Virtues in the Wild Nearby (doesn’t that sound like a book I would love? I do!); Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things; and Paul Harding’s Tinkers. Recent bedtime reading included a Saul Bellow novella, The Theft, and Michele Harper’s memoir, The Beauty in Breaking. Since drafting this post, I have slipped into the long ago of One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, by Michael Frank, a time when Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Italians lived peacefully together on the island of Rhodes. At least, that’s how and where the book begins. I’m afraid it may go somewhere darker before it ends, but I will go with Stella wherever she goes….

 

On a lighter note, this coming week at Dog Ears Books should see delivery of neighbor Robert Underhill’s new murder mystery, One Cold Coffee. Customers have been clamoring for a new Underhill novel for the last couple of years, so the first two copies he brought me went out the door before I could even open one myself. “I hope you’ll read it, too,” Bob said. Well, of course! 

[Update: 6/13, 12:45 p.m. It's here now!]

Does all this drifting from book to book make me sound like a shallow consumer of the printed word? I was heartened recently to read of a study showing that reading anything in a series of short sessions, rather than all at once, actually helps us remember better what we have read. We remember longer what we don’t read all at once. Immediately I thought of meeting in a small group for eight consecutive sessions to discuss James Joyce’s Ulysses. Despite everything we have read and discussed in years since, the Ulysses experience for me was our never-equalled benchmark in terms of meaningful reading, because we took so much time with it. I think of this kind of involvement with a book as not just reading but living with and in the book day after day.

 

One June I was immersed in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy for the entire month. Another time it was The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, by Van Wyck Brooks, a history of American literature during those years of the 19^th century. I recommend the Brooks literary histories as “slow books.” He doesn’t rush his story, and a reader cannot rush through, either. One settles down to a 19^th-century pace.

 

Now as the summer solstice is fast approaching, it can seem as if we are careening toward that longest day, a day that comes all too soon, after which there will be increasingly less daylight to fill with summer activities through July and August. To slow time down now, even if you can only do so in quarter-hours here and there, make it a point to read slowly, wander aimlessly, to putter, saunter, loll, etc. Think of the best words you know to describe the voluptuous sense of wrapping yourself in slow moments....

 

Maybe, like the short reading sessions, twenty minutes of any kind of undirected leisure here and an hour there is what we will remember best and longest when winter returns – for instance, that lovely, surprising morning coffee moment when the house wren landed on the windowsill! Ah, yes! I hope so!

 

 

Grief Notes:

 

When it comes to grief, though, time is almost nonexistent. One can count weeks and months following loss, but there is no measuring its depth. One does not “get through” or “get over” it. You are involuntarily exiled from the beloved and familiar and transported overnight to a strange new place. You will never return. You will never forget. You simply go on, because there’s nothing else to do, because you are alive, because the one you loved “would want you to,” and so on and so forth. 

 

The sun shines, clouds form, rain falls. Birds sing and nest, flowers and trees blossom and grow. Young couples fall in love, and babies are born. The earth continues its revolutions, and night and day alternate, as they always have. Sometimes you smile or laugh. Everything is the same as it’s always been, and -- nothing will ever be the same again. 

 

It is love that is everything, and you had love, its joy and its pain. Now you have memories, a volume of images and remembered conversations that come throughout the day and in dreams at night. To live without this grief would be “never to have loved,” and how could anyone wish for that?

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

   I feel it, when I sorrow most;

   'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson