Vernalruminations

LA PRIMAVERA CORONA 2020 Snowdrops have been out for several weeks and are almost finished.  The yard is carpeted in the little blue flowers whose name I’ve never learned.  A young woodchuck is wandering the neighborhood at dawn and twilight and sometimes in broad daylight. The first I’ve ever seen on this street and I have no explanation for his invasion.  He seems to be solo, no family attached. I clipped forsithea branches in mid-February to force them and brighten my home, but now the shrubs themselves have burst into a sea of brilliant yellow on their own. The cherry tree outside the kitchen has buds that are holding back but visibly ready to burst on the first warm day. The begonias in my living room that sport beautiful large leaves all winter have sent up their slender spikes with the delicate pink blossoms. A few weeks ago an ambitious and optimistic pair of house sparrows began to construct a nest in the birdfeeder outside my kitchen wi...

Dos manos      Before the trip to Brownsville, Texas, to help prepare and serve food to asylum seekers held in the tent city across the river in Matamoros, Mexico, Marti told us to bring fanny packs or other bags that would leave our hands free. Whether chopping vegetables or serving from the trays of hot food to the 1,000+ men, women, and children of every age, we would need both our hands , dos manos , at all times. How did we come to be there and why were we doing this? Hunger and homelessness exist inside our nation’s borders, both in cities and rural areas. Tightrope, the new book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, describes families shattered by what the authors call “death by despair.” Donating to good causes and volunteering at soup kitchens are not uncommon, and churches and other organizations strive to meet the need on a daily basis. Still, the need that drew a dozen women in their 60s, 70s and 80s to this community just across the Texas...

emita.hill@gmail.com LUCY LOCKET  I first posted this in 2019.  Was going to write a new blog for this year but the only changes I'll make are to say that today she would be not 124 but 128. A woman of many parts. Her progeny is numerous and scattered across this nation and onto other continents, all of them interesting men and women with four generations now for whom she would be the great great grandmother.   Born in 1895 in Chicago, Lucy was the youngest of four with two older sisters and a brother. Every summer when I am in Michigan in my cottage on her lake, Long Lake, where her family traveled by train from Chicago before 1900 when she was an infant, my brain floods with memories of Lucy “Locket” Jewett, and of her many passions and predilections and peculiarities, all of which shaped me and my life and that of my four sisters for better or worse. Like her I was the youngest, and in my case it was by a decade and more, so that she was aging as I grew in...

Carpe Diem      Carpe diem , my father said. Tempus fugit .   Like Montaigne’s father he believed in installing Latin in a child, but in my case only smatterings of Latin.   Still, I always remembered those phrases and the English equivalents to seize the day and savor the moment.   When later, in France, I encountered the phrase “ Mettons cela à l’abri ,” that became my personal motto. Each morning from mid-May through Columbus Day and sometimes later I leave a warm bed to swim in Long Lake if I’m in Michigan, in Long Island Sound if I’m back in New Rochelle.   People think I’m crazy, and maybe I am, but I treasure that early morning swim that I have seized and put safely into that day whatever else it brings.   “ Mettons cela à l’abri, ” and it’s yours. Others jog or take out a canoe on the still waters at that same hour of the day. They, too, savor and save and have that memory—a sunrise, a pair of loons, the loughing in the tre...