Margotlog: What Is So Rare as a Day in May?

Margotlog: What Is So Rare as a Day in May?

Here in North Country Land, we've suffered through a very very long winter. There was a snowfall in early May. I thought I might slit my throat and let a few drops of red blood festoon the white. Suddenly, all has changed, and as Yeats wrote, "a terrible beauty is born." But it's not terrible. "It's wonderful, it's marvelous that you should care for me. It's awful nice, It's paradise, It's what I long to see. You make my life so glamorous." That's Fred Astair singing to Audrey Hepburn in "Funny Face," one of their June/January matings which were as kind and friendly and even a little silly, always ending in "amorous." Note: It was the Gershwin brothers who wrote the song.

The robins in our back yard are strutting about with their red vests puffed out as if they were marshals at the parade. A wren pair has taken up residence in our neighbor's "play" house, where they've raised a brood for three or four years in a row. The noisiest of birds, and some of the smallest. I love their stuck-up tails and chatter in the vines. Even a female grosbeak, not as flaboyantly black and red as her consort, but still a biggish, brown-streaked bird with, as her name suggests, a very large beak, comes every day to the feeder.

Yes, the birds are back, but it's the sudden eruption of green and sweet scents that make me swoon. Years ago, outside the front window, I planted against all caution a sunburst locust --"too small a yard for three large trees" frowned the arborist. Yet the locust has flourished, and now spreads its fluffy, yellow-green fronds (truly more like a fern than a tree) outside my window. Up and down the avenues, as I walk to the drug store, huge lilacs hold their bouquets of light purple and white with such aplomb as to be dancers in a ballet.

Yet, there are already weeds--tree shoots I should have removed last autumn now wave their success in my face. I promise myself tomorrow to go out and whack them to the ground. There are losses: the beautiful azalea that returned for three years with its clusters of pink flowers--a lot like ballerinas dancing "The Sugar Plum Fair"--has succumbed to one of the longest and coldest winters we'd had in a long time. Only one side is in bloom, but the cluster of delicate pink flowers reminds me of home in Charleston, South Carolina, where the true azaleas bloom in April or even March, and the entire neighborhood where I grew up is rich with pink, just as ours is now. Ah, horticultureal success, and global-warming, bring the south to us in the north land. Amen. 

Margotlog: Notes from Florence - 2018

Notes from Florence - 2018

     In the part of Azelio, a teacher calls to her children. If we were in the U.S., she's ask them to say
"cheese." But here, where cheese is beloved, she asks for a "soriso," a smile like a sunrise.
 So many of her pupils are Asian, I comment. She answers, "Chinese" Nearby a new mother coos to her baby, encourages, "Say 'Papa,' say 'Mama.'" A merli like our American robin except all black, flies across the path, its chirrup like the robin I left at home, perching on our birdbath filling up with snow.

    Who belongs where anymore? I name one of the few Italian trees I remember, "tilio," much like our North American bassrood with its heart-shaped leaves. Nearby a man with bronze skin leans over his knees as if sick. Should I offer him part of my sandwich? So much known and unknown. A man with pale skin rides a bicycle through the shade, his tailored coattails flapping. As I approach the slumped man, he sits up, pulls a ringing cell phone from his pocket, andputs it to his ear.