Spring 2004
| MACARONI # 62 Spring 2004 |
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films |
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| int'l festival | ||
| restaurants |
Rites of Spring
The minimum is the measuring unit in the realm of quantity. In the realm of values, the highest values are the measuring unit. Things can only be correctly evaluated by comparing them with the most valuable.
—Ortega y Gasset
The scarlet elderberry sambucus pubens , (also known as the red-berried elderberry, the red elderberry, and the American red elderberry) is considered a weed by many gardeners. I noticed long ago, however, that it grows well under the spruce trees in my back yard. And so, as the lower branches of that once-beautiful line of evergreens began to die off, I made it a point to dig up the volunteer elderberries that had sprouted up here and there and replant them strategically throughout the underbrush. The branches of the spruce trees have long since been lopped off to a height of twenty feet or more by our neighbors, who own the trees, but little matter—there is now a well-established bank of elderberry bushes filling in the lower reaches of the space those branches once occupied. It would be an exaggeration to call it a hedge. The shrub shoots out willy-nilly, and the effect is more one of lofty mounds of shapely green leaves than of anything rigorous or formal. That's all the better, as far as I'm concerned. And, as an added bonus, the elderberry is covered in late spring by racemes of creamy white flowers, which are followed a few weeks later by clumps of tiny red berries that are equally dazzling in the shadows of our otherwise rather colorless backyard.
I can see why some people consider the plant a weed. It spreads seedlings liberally, and the soft, almost hollow branches quickly sprout to ungainly heights. On the other hand, the time it takes to keep those branches and seedlings under control amounts to only a few minutes a year.
The elderberry is the first plant in our backyard to produce leaves in the spring. I'd like to say that I'm moved at the sight of this inaugural splash of green, but the truth is I'm seldom much moved by anything in the early springtime. Yes, the winter months can drag on, with too little snow for skiing and no vegetation to mask the increasingly harsh glare of the sun off the dry brown dirt and naked underbrush; and yes, it's great fun to spot the first returning bluebird, or hear the first coo of the mourning dove, which enters the consciousness surreptitiously, like a half-remembered dream. But such experiences tend to be short-lived and unduly intellectual. For me, early spring brings with it neither the joy of rebirth nor the melancholy disappointment of unfulfilled promises, but simply a muteness of spirit. It's a physiological thing, like a vitamin deficiency or a cold, and it invariably passes.
Before long the fox sparrows are passing through the back yard, scratching furiously amid the dead leaves. And then it's the ruby crowned kinglets with their striking and exuberant songs. The brilliant color patch for which this nervous little bird is named is seldom visible, even at very close range, but during the spring mating season you can often see it from across the yard. A few warm days, and although it's still very dry, that faint haze of new color appears in the branches of the willows, the red flowers of the maple trees, and the fuzzy catkins of the poplars. Honeysuckles begin to leaf out. It's the time when we bring the furniture back out on the deck, when grilling once again becomes a natural evening activity.
I was out a few days ago cutting down a few trees the size of my forearm from the margin of our miniature forest, in the hope that letting more light into the interior would help it to fill in. My neighbor Charles came out to grill a chicken, and we had our annual back-fence conversation.
“How's it going?”
“Doing fine. How about you.”
“Heaven and hell. Same as always.”
“Nice evening for grilling.”
“Ah,yes.”
Hilary and I carry our bikes come up from the basement, and take the first of those wonderful rides down the parkway, past the bridge construction north of Cedar Lake, and finally along the 29 th street Greenway, wending our way east past gardens and studios that remind us of Amsterdam. A visit to the Art Institute, a chat with friends who live nearby on their very urban porch, lunch at the Fuji-Ya, then back home along the fine new paths that circle the lakes, with spring clouds blustering past, followed by blasts of uncomfortably hot sunlight. We stop to watch the red-breasted mergansers, who are still doing their aquatic break-dance out in Cedar Lake—in fact, everything is coming alive.
And then the thunderstorms. Gray clouds, distant rumbling, wind, calmness. The rain comes down as we emerge in late afternoon light from the Oak Street Theater, having watched yet one more of the intriguing, if often half-baked, foreign films that have been brought in for the local festival.
The other day, I selected a book off the shelf almost at random— The Liar , by Martin Hansen—and soon found myself immersed in a beautiful tale of the spring thaw on a tiny Danish island, as told by an observant and eccentric bachelor school-teacher from the mainland—a birdwatcher, a hunter, a naturalist, a parish clerk—about whom it might almost be said, a little grandiosely, “He saved others. Himself he could not save.”
Yes the world is coming alive, and so am I. Do you realize how long it's been since I've read an actual novel? Too many long and well-reasoned analyses of the debacle in Iraq, too many essays about cattle-rustling in Nevada, and life in the deserts of southern California, where we spent some time a few months ago. Too much George Perec! And too much Bach!