This week on our walks, as we circle around the pond or up the road and back, we have discussed choices and paths not taken. Tonight’s loop took us past the shed we fondly call the poetry hut that Warren built for Zoe when she was 11 and wanted a space of her own. It now stores our packing materials. Warren talked about his first impressions of this piece of land after a chance sighting of an ad in the Washington Post. I reflected on how this year of staying home during the pandemic with daily local walks has more firmly rooted me in Virginia. We noted the paths we walk and the paths we didn’t take in chance encounters, job offers, education or romance. The quiet grey of sky, still pond, and green burgeoning of honeysuckle is like the inhale before the rush of spring growth.

“Chance … has a distinct meaning for me. I do not know where I might have been led by the paths that, as I look back, I think I might have taken but that in fact I did not take. What is certain is that I am satisfied with my fate and that I should not want it changed in any way at all. So I look upon these factors that helped me to fulfill it as so many fortunate strokes of chance.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done
[Thanks to brainpickings.org]

I read my Mom’s journals and am impressed by how full they are with quotes, sketches, scribbles, and beginnings of poems, leavened by only occasional moments of doubt about her work or her school choices for us children. Her poems, at times, may be too concerned with rhyme for my taste, but her inspiration from NYC entering into spring as each tree on her block begins to bud is infectious.

She was driven to express the simplicity and the variety of growth in flowers, bushes and trees. She was dedicated to finding joy in the everyday and spreading that joy and hope. Each day she sought to be more organized, to have her worktable ready to go though frequently that was a loosing battle. She wanted to work on nice paper but so often was afraid to use it so instead used small postcards and printed on the backs of envelopes. She felt strongly about choosing a path that was very human, aiming to show her true self. At one point in her journal she asks herself, what is it about sunrise and sunset that moves her to take so many photos, to make so many drawings? She answers, sunrises and sunsets are the treasure; they remind her of the essence of life right here and now.

I don’t worry about rhyme. Two trees,
One next to the other, are rarely identical.
I think and write the way flowers have color,
But how I express myself is less perfect,
For I lack the divine simplicity
Of being only my outer self.
I look and I am moved,
I am moved by the way water flows when the
ground slopes,
And my poetry is natural like the stirring of the
wind …

Alberto Caeiro, from “XIV” in The Keeper of Sheep; A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, ed. & transl. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2006

When I went to Wollam Gardens in search of flowers I was hunting for those blossoms that were hinting at Spring for a much needed dose of hope.

As if the purpose
Of beauty
Was to hurt me more alive.

Gregory Orr, from “Certain poems offer me … ,” The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write (W. W. Norton & Co., 2019)

Under blue skies we put a few broccoli and spinach seedlings in the dirt today while listening to the dog, the crow, and the peepers .

the god of dirt

The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things;
I lay on the grass listening to
his dog voice,
crow voice,
frog voice;
now he said,
and now,
and never once mentioned forever.

— Mary Oliver, from “One or Two Things”

Welcome to Spring 2021. Here in Virginia it feels like the ground swell of spring is moving. The fields have a hint of green, the red maples have a tone of deep red, the daffodils have begun to open and each tiny shift is so welcome in this year of the pandemic.

I have done so little
For you,
And you have done so little
For me,
That we have good reason
Never to agree.

I, however,
Have such meager
Power,
Clutching at a
Moment,
While you control
An hour.

But your hour is
A stone.

My moment is
A flower.

Poet to Bigot
— Langston Hughes