Nothing to Say

 

Memorial Day Saturday and Sunday were busy at the bookstore. Memorial Day itself was rainy, and I stayed home, pretty sure that most weekenders would be getting an early start on returning home themselves. And mine this time was a true day off – no mowing, no weeding, no hauling bricks (for an ongoing project, most mornings six bricks at a time, in two buckets, uphill), and only short walks with Sunny Juliet. Relaxing, writing, reading. When I reached the last page of a classic noir novel, In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, I turned for relief to Harlan Hubbard’s Payne Hollow. 

 

Noir fiction: dark, nihilistic, and violent. My question: Why does art bother to imitate this kind of life, when we have more than enough real-life dark, nihilistic violence? Oh, don’t bother to answer. It’s a challenge trying to get into the mind of compulsive murderers, etc., etc., blah-blah-blah. I’ll take Dostoevsky, thanks.

 

I’m rambling because I truly have nothing to say. My head is full of dark thoughts about the future of the world, and I don’t want to encourage myself in that direction. Better to think about the season’s first blooming buttercups (think: 'little frogs') and the progress I’m making with that brick project at home (think: the brick walk to my grandparents' outhouse, roofed by grape trellis along its length).

Northern Michigan is as lush and green as a jungle these days. (Don’t think of ticks.)

Thanks to Mother Nature

Blossoms in the fog

According to Jim Nugent, cherry farmer and former county extension agent, quoted in the current Leelanau Enterprise, spring is two weeks behind schedule this year. Maybe that’s good news for the growers, lessening their worry about a late freeze. It’s certainly nice for summer people and holiday visitors arriving for Memorial Day weekend, who otherwise would have missed the show. For them, the timing could not be better. 

Not all orchards or trees are in bloom yet — some barely on the verge of blossom — but every day, every hour, more join the blooming symphony, and the wild cherries are flowering, too, amid impressionistic first woodland leaves.

As always, I would remind you not to miss nature’s more modest spring offerings, such as tiny violas on the orchard floor. So tiny, so sweet, so easy overlooked!

There is plenty of water, too — no worries this year about low lake levels! Northport Creek is high! The water at the boat launch is high! The other morning (I’m not sure how it looks today), even the water level in the parking lot by the marina was high! Swimming should be excellent for the summer of 2019, though shoreline property owners will doubtless have challenges. 

Yes, we have rain, too, it’s true And during breaks in the rain, to be perfectly frank, some kind of pesky fly is out in the villages in little annoying clouds. 

“What’s with the flies?” a stranger on the sidewalk asked me in an aggrieved tone as I was coming out of the bank. I told him I had no idea. “Oh, you don’t live here!” He sounded annoyed about that, too, as if I’d only been masquerading as a local.

“I live here,” I told him, “but I don’t know what the flies are.”

“Is it like this every year?” 

He was demanding satisfaction I couldn’t provide. 

“Every year is different,” I told him cheerfully. 

And that’s the truth. The weather is different from one spring to another, one summer to another, no two falls or any two winters ever the same. The cherry trees don’t blossom according to a specific date on the calendar, either. When will the cherry trees bloom? When they are ready. 

So wear warm clothes and carry an umbrella, but carry a camera, too, and be prepared to stop and smile and take deep, happy breaths, because this year Nature has given us cherry blossoms for the Memorial Day weekend — and what could be more beautiful?