Wednesday, April 25,
3:40-4:45 p.m.
It is an overcast and
windless afternoon, after a sunny, cool morning. The still air is filled with
the lightest of insect clicking and chirping, a thin blanket of sound so pervasive
it is difficult to distinguish from silence. The air itself feels moist—not
heavily or oppressively so—rather, it feels protective, sheltering life.
Here by the side of an old
dirt road at orchard’s edge, cherry trees full of bloom, grass beneath them
studded with dandelions and other, smaller flowering weeds, there should be a
steady hum of bees, but clouds and cold have clearly discouraged the large work
parties. Tiny flies flit among the higher branches, doing what they can in the
way of pollination, and a few larger flies punctuate the quiet stillness from
time to time with loud buzzing.
Blossoming trees do not form
the undulating expanses of popcorn or clouds of snow usually seen across the
hills when bloom comes later in the spring, as it should. The trees flowered too early this year and have been punished by subsequent cold. From a
distance—say, from a speeding car—one might wonder if full bloom were yet to
come, but close observation banishes uncertainty. Each five-petaled flower, not
much larger than a thumbnail, bristles with eager stamens, but many white
petals are creased or folded in on themselves at the edges, those edges
browning, too. Weary, they look, tired of trying.
One flower form is repeated
along a branch, that branch repeated throughout the tree, and rows of trees
full of blossoming branches stand side by side, one after another. Genetically,
the trees are clones, but each tree and branch and blossom has met the world in
circumstances slightly different, in its own space of air and light and shadow,
and has been marked by those differences, resulting in intricacy endlessly
repeated in endless variation.
Sounds compose themselves
into a simple map: distant traffic far to the north, distant tractor to the
south; rooster to the west, woodpecker to the east. The map’s center, for a
moment, is one large, buzzing fly. On the south side of the road, someone has
made two passes with tractor and tiller over the edge of the field and then
stopped. Visible at the western horizon, Lake Michigan lies motionless and
patient, cradling its islands in its arms.
