Another Woman's Garden

Another woman’s garden grows in mine:
here her daffodils, my bluebells, her white columbine,
my narcissus jumbled with her trillium,
her trout lilies confusing my rosarium.
Though I would not know this woman by her face,
my garden gives her vision honored space.
Each spring my order’s changed by her intent,
sure sign hegemony is not what nature meant.

Grace

Last night, out of the blue, I received a phone call from the daughter of my best friend who died in a traffic accident a year and a half ago. Because my friend and I lived on opposite coasts, we exchanged pictures but rarely saw each other’s children. So even though her daughter is my daughter’s age and they attended the same college, I really didn’t know her or her younger brother. But now here she was, smack in the middle of an April evening, telling me her plans and her brother’s whereabouts, as openly as if we’d talked many times before. Though we touched briefly on how hard it is to cope with the sudden death of someone we love, we talked more about the present and the future than the past. We promised to keep in touch.

After I hung up, I thought about our conversation. I thought about how unexpectedly this young woman had come into my life on an otherwise ordinary day. I thought about how my maternal feelings had kicked in when I talked with her, how similar our conversation was to phone conversations with my own adult children. I thought about how her speech cadences had reminded me of her mother’s. I thought about how I felt blessed in the same way I used to when I got off the phone with her mother. It wasn’t the same as talking with her mother, but it was the next best thing. It was grounding. It was healing. It was a gift.

The siberian squill have come out now and they are everywhere, carpeting the woods, creeping out onto lawns, creating a vast blue carpet the same deep hue as the April sky. Although I've lived here long enough to expect them, every spring when they emerge I'm astonished again by their beauty. I suppose a scientist would say that the squill have their own reasons for covering my woods and lawn in such glorious color, and no doubt that's true. But I think they're also a sign of God's surprising extravagance, otherwise known as grace.

In spring it seems especially easy to perceive these signs of grace in our lives. But grace comes in all seasons, and assumes many guises. What's characteristic is that grace always surprises us. It reminds us that life is a mystery. Encountering grace leaves us knowing that, in some small way, we have been made whole again. We know for certain we have been blessed.

Easter Mysteries

Last Thursday night at our church’s tenebrae service I sang sorrowing hymns with the congregation and choir, hymns that commemorate the suffering and death of Jesus. On Sunday morning I sang with them the joyful Easter hymns of resurrection. I’ve been singing these hymns for so many years that I know all their verses by heart. The danger with knowing a song by heart, of course, is that the words can get lost in the music. And the same is true of the Easter story: familiarity can swallow meaning.

I have heard this story every year for as long as I can remember. I know it so well I no longer appreciate its shock value. I say that Jesus was crucified, died and buried and on the third day was raised from the dead but forget that it’s a declaration that makes no sense. By all rational measures, it’s absurd, (as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians.)

Added to that, the risen Christ is a very mysterious figure. The gospels are clear about only one thing: that He rose from the dead. After that, the story gets pretty hazy. People don’t seem to recognize Jesus at first. He appears unexpectedly and vanishes without warning. Even his friends, who you’d think would know him the instant they saw him, have no idea who he is. They believe he’s a stranger until they’re cued in by his voice or his actions.

The truth is I don’t fully understand what we celebrate at Easter. I rejoice in a faith that is, by its very nature, beyond understanding. I sing the glorious, triumphant hymns. I recite the familiar liturgy: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! without being stunned.

But I should be stunned. I should be reeling in my pew. The hair on the back of my neck should be standing up straight. I should feel as if the world has been picked up and shaken. I should feel as if my life has turned inside out.

Because it has.

April Birthdays

Recently it occurred to me that several of my friends have April birthdays. I don’t know if this curiosity is in any way significant, but I’ve spent some time pondering it in the last few days. April is a transformational month here in New England, so perhaps it’s noteworthy that most (though not all) of these friends were born here. It seems like a pretty good time of year to have a baby, since the chilly temperatures and starkly barren earth will soon give way to warmth and flowers. Birthdays, after all, celebrate life. And a friend’s birthday celebrates a particular life, one that has shaped and marked ours in important ways. If life is a tapestry, then our friends are surely its brightest threads.

In the last few years, two of my friends with April birthdays have died, both victims of traffic accidents. One of them was my lifelong college best friend. Her passing has left a ragged tear in my life that cannot be mended. The happiness I felt when her birthday rolled around each April – a day which I celebrated with her for over forty years – though too often from afar – is now sorrow-stained. Yet I still celebrate it, for her death has not diminished the impact of her life on mine.

I suspect that the commemoration of a birthday is a celebration not primarily of our own life but of our connection to the lives of others. Our celebration is actually less about our own individuality than about the “ties that bind.” We celebrate not the thread, but the tapestry.

Close Up

Today the landscape looks raw, scraped gray by the rigors of winter. Shoulder-high piles of branches lie by the roadside, remnant fences of last winter’s big ice storm. On my drive to work, I pass forests shorn by that ice; broken trees poke jagged shafts toward the sky but they look hostile and menacing, like the trees in a horror movie. Winter litter still lies along the roadside: errant plastic bags, beer cans, mashed cardboard boxes, the mysteriously shredded tires of eighteen-wheelers.

But it is spring, and the daffodils are up. They're unassuming little splashes of color, except where some imaginative gardener has massed them in large patches or spread them in wide ribbons along a walkway . Mostly they nod and bob alone in the cold gusts of wind, take lonely bows under the hard rain.

Close up, though, each daffodil is a golden world, a buttery promise of warmth to come. Sunshine in a cup.

Bad Days

I’ve had two bad days in a row. Not dreadful days; not terrifying days. Just days when things don’t go well, when I felt a bit like a car that’s not running on all cylinders. Over the years I’ve learned to be cautious on such days. I try not to make important decisions. I try not to compensate for my off-kilter feelings by pushing myself harder. I try to remember that I’ve had bad days before and they don’t last forever. I listen to music: the Bach Cell Suites and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and my son’s piano improvisations. I sing hymns: Amazing Grace, Softly and Tenderly, and Precious Lord. Music always helps.

Bad days are like thunderstorms. They diminish the light; they threaten; they stir us to seek shelter. Sometimes they startle us with sudden flashes of light; sometimes they shake the ground beneath our feet. Sometimes they drench us. But, like thunderstorms, they pass. The dark clouds roll away and the sun shines again.

This morning it’s foggy again and it’s raining. I had bad dreams last night. There are thunderstorms in the weather forecast. But right now there are robins all over our lawn, singing their spring hymns.

April

This morning the world is etched in shades of gray and white. A cold fog drifts along the ground, muting the colors. The lawns are brown; in the woods old leaves mat the ground.

The snowdrops are still in bloom, unobtrusive, close to the ground, as if they’re still half-snow. They’re hard to see from a distance, though they’ve spread themselves in fat clumps under the bigger trees out back, and I can spot them from my study window if I know where to look.

Siberian squill have popped up all over the back yard, but they haven’t unfurled, so they don’t yet look like a blue carpet. The crocuses have bloomed and folded and have now collapsed under yesterday’s rain. They lie flat, pressed to the ground.

This Sunday is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In church we’ll sing hymns and wave palm leaves and ponder the mysteries of life and death. We’ll think about joy in the face of suffering and sacrifice. We’ll talk with each other at coffee hour after the worship service. It’s our own kind of clumping together and showing ourselves, a bit like the snowdrops.

Yesterday I saw daffodils in bloom.