“An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.”
– Denise Levertov, The Breathing
“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly”.
Pablo Neruda
We may be three days into summer but aside from the date on the calendar, it would be difficult to prove otherwise. It is unseasonably cool, the skies stony gray, the rivers running full and fast, the ground peppered with puddles. Rain fell in torrents last night, hiding behind the cover of darkness as if ashamed of itself. As it should be. Then a mid-afternoon thunder and lightening gully-washing storm passed through and completely drenched my drying laundry on the clothesline.
Enough is enough.
What all this moisture yields is acres and acres of towering grass growth, more grass than imaginable, more grass than we can keep mowed, burying the horses up to their backs as they dive head long into the pasture. The Haflingers don’t need to lower their necks to graze, choosing instead to simply strip off the ripe tops of the grasses as they forge paths through five foot forage. It is like children at a birthday party swiping the frosting off cupcake after cupcake, licking their fingers as they go. Instead of icing, the horses’ muzzles are smeared with dandelion fluff, grass seed and buttercup petals.
June tends to shroud its promise of longer days under clouds in the northwest. Outdoor weddings brace for rain and wind with a supply of umbrellas, graduation picnics are served in the garage and Fathers’ Day barbeques under tent canopies. There is a wary anticipation of solstice as it signals the slow inexorable return of darkness from which we have not yet recovered.
So I tremble as I splash through the squishiness of June, quivering like a wet butterfly emerging from its cocoon ready to unfurl its wings to dry, but unsure how to fly and uncertain of the new world that awaits. In fact the dark empty cocoon can look mighty inviting on a rainy June night or during a loud mid-day thunderstorm. If I could manage to squeeze myself back in, it might be worth a try.
After all, there is no place like home.
“It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath.
Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes.
To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early,
and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow
that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night.
And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic
is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second;
this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.”
Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine
Every autumn my father, an agriculture teacher by training, brought home gunny sacks of grass seed from the feed and seed store. He would start up his 1954 Farmall Cub tractor, proceed to disc and harrow an acre of bare ground in our field, and then fill the seeder, distributing seed on the soil for his annual agronomy cover crop over winter growing experiment. The little sprouts would wait to appear in the warming spring weather, an initial green haziness spread over the brown dirt, almost like damp green mold. Within days they would form a plush and inviting velveteen green cushion, substantial enough for a little wiggle of blades in the breezes. A few weeks later the cover would be a full fledged head of waving green hair, the wind blowing it wantonly, bending the stems to its will. It was botanical pasture magic, renewable and marvelous, only to be mowed and stubble turned over with the plow back into the soil as nutrition for the summer planting to come. It was the sacrificial nature of cover crops to be briefly beautiful on top of the ground, but the foundational nurture once underground.
One spring the expected grassy carpet growth didn’t look quite the same after germination–the sprouts were little round leaves, not sharp edged blades. Instead of identical uniform upright stems, the field was producing curly chaotic ovoid and spherical shapes and sizes. Clover didn’t abide by the same rules as grasses. It had a mind of its own with a burgeoning and bumpy napped surface that didn’t bend with breezes, all its effort invested instead in producing blossoms.
A hint of pink one morning was so subtle it was almost hallucinatory. Within a day it was unmistakeably reddening and real. Within a week the green sea flowed with bobbing crimson heads. We had never seen such vibrancy spring from our soil before. It exuded scented clover breath, the fragrance calling honey bees far and near. True reverie.
The field of crimson dreams and sated honey bees lasted several weeks before my father headed back out on the Farmall to turn it under with the plow, burying the fading blossoms into the ground. Their sacrifice bled red into the soil, their fragrant breath halted, their memory barely recognizable in the next summer crop germination. Yet the crimson heads were there, feeding the growth of the next generation, deepening the green as it reached to the sun.
Such a sweet thing, alive a thousand summers hence in the soil.
What a beautiful feeling.
Crimson and clover, over and over.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson