How Can I keep from Singing

I was surprised by spring this year. The returning birds and the old faithfuls; the bulbs barely visible, growing straight up out of the dirt and bursting into little hyacinths, daffodils and tulips; the bare branch of the maple tree outside my bedroom window preening for summer with reddish whiskery buds which transition into tiny replicas of big maple leaves in a unbelievable shade of golden green, and now those big distinctively five fingered shade-makers we think of as maple leaves. I have been surprised by the deceptive but delightful burst of sunshine and warmth on a day in early April, promising the end of dreariness, though by nightfall it is weighted down and darkened by rain heavy clouds - good-bye sunshine and time in the garden - and surprised again a few days later when we are back to basking. Surprised by how the rain reeves up the brook galloping down the hillside, and how the rain can brighten the wet leaves when the clouds lift so that everything glistens newly-washed, ready for what follows. What follows is a continuous unveiling of surprises in woods, fields, brook - and spirit. Most of all I am surprised by my surprise. Somehow or other I have navigated more than eighty springs, and still there are the surprises, each change a rediscovered pleasure to savor and return to.

The only way I can account for this is old age. That’s also surprising. For all my eighty plus years the run-off from snow has sent the brook into a frenzy, cutting its way down the mountain, maybe a few eons ago. There have been bulbs bursting out of the brown earth for thousands of years, birds surprising in the trees if not at a feeder, and blue skies reflected in puddles. But my attention was on other things: growing children, grading papers, getting here on time and there before..before what? Before dark? Before the youngest fell out of the tree? Before the blueberries were all gone? Before the bell?  Before the money ran out? Before the deadline?

Sure I noticed the birds. In Nova Scotia one summer I made a list of all the birds on an arrival and departures chart - around 59 of them - but did I stop to watch how they pecked or flew or sang? Maybe, sometimes, but not every morning from the kitchen window, with and without binoculars, until I could distinguish between four varieties of sparrows, and could tell which nondescript brownish female went with which gorgeous orange and black oriole, striped and rouged up rose-breasted grosbeak or luminous blue-green Indigo bunting. Add the gold finches and a cardinal or two at the same time and I might as well have been in the tropics where birds flaunt their colors. I watched the grass grow - don’t laugh - and the trees leaf out, and the big gray squirrels defeat every attempt at a squirrel proof feeder, with gravity defying leaps and a so-there flounce of their long gray tails.

I have all the accruements of old age: a dicey heart; a history of cancer; failing sight and hearing; arthuritis,- as my fishermen friends called their aching bones,- and the eminent threat of mortality, but, isn’t this ironic? - although I have less time to live I have more time to see, and feel, and be. The world enlarges us with surprises. I have no job, no children to care for, no students to respond to or administrators to placate, no deadlines.  Time to look, linger, look again. Time to luxuriate in what there is to see and feel and hear.  As I look out the window, walk down the road in the early morning sun, get a call to chat from my daughter, or a compliment from a former student, the refrain of an old Quaker song come back: When the sun is on the maple tree… how can I keep from singing? When the peonies unfold, how can I keep from singing? When my children and their children are safe in the full flood of life, how can I keep from singing?  All of this, and then the friends, the calls, the meals and talks, the promise of continuing adventures, how can I keep from singing?

Fred’s Writing Group. June 8, 2019