From Where I Sit

And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune. . . .
James Russell Lowell

Last week, consumed by an urge to build something, and determined to do so using lumber I already had (leftovers from other projects) I came across the plans for an Aldo Leopold bench. He was an ardent conservationist, and designed the bench as an easy way to make a place to sit outside. Problem was, I didn't have that lumber, no long 2x12s sitting around. I did have a few 2x4s, and a scrap of 2x12. So I adapted the plan to make a chair instead of a bench, and I think it came together nicely. But nowhere to set a coffee cup, so I made a sort of side table, a sort of mini-sawhorse, which can also double as a second seat. The only thing I had to buy new was acrylic stain to waterproof the pair.

They sit out here in my front yard, in a little grotto I have created under a large red oak tree. Grass won't grow here, in all that shade, so I let ground cover plants take over, and circled it with rocks I gathered from construction sites, and made a sort of walkway through it. Later I added an old-fashioned looking concrete birdbath. It all seems to have come together nicely. People do a lot of strolling during this pandemic lockdown, and sometimes they notice me sitting here, and wave; mostly they don't see me over here, up near the house, because they don't expect to see me here.

I like it that way.

I sit with my large, grayish, basalt boulder to my left, my coffee-holding side table to my right. I can see the sky through gaps in the trees, a pale blue and bluish white. I can't name the plants around me, since they were planted by my predecessors 20 or so years back, though they had constrained them to specific plats. But whatever they are technically called, I call them my groundscape. Their leaves twitch in the intermittent breeze. The temp is nearly perfect, 73 degrees F. I hear birds chittering and calling, the (thankfully) distant background noise of traffic, a dog barking somewhere, the tree leaves rustling as the breeze picks up. A babysitter and toddler are on the porch across the street, and I hear their voices indistinctly. A car slips past, its engine barely audible. For some reason I remember once standing by the side of the road late at night in rural Wyoming, and hearing a car approaching from miles away. I was impressed and surprised, but one of my companions, having grown up on a Nebraska farm laughed, and said that's how it was when you're miles from anywhere.

A pair of crows have settled in my neighbor's tree. They argue loudly, then fly off, harsh voices trailing behind. A tiny green bug drops from the leaves overhead and I ever so gently brush him away. It's really his world out here, not mine, and I want to minimize my intrusion.

I feel that I'm sitting in the sort of perfection that could not be bought and built with all the money in the world. It's simply here, and I've been invited to settle in for a bit.

I feel an urge to capture this moment, but I know it's impossible. A camera could never do it. I want to burn it into my memory, but I know that won't really work. Fifty years ago I stood in a wide river canyon in Afghanistan, looking out at a rock-strewn landscape, a roaring blue and white river rushing past, with green-flecked mountains reaching skyward on the other side. I made a conscious effort to freeze the image in my memory, but when go to find it I find only a memory of a memory, sort of like an old-fashioned library index card. I sort of see the scene, but I can't step back into it. Like Heraclitus' river, that river is gone, the same but irretrievably different.

I think of my agate collection, rocks sliced open to reveal colorful remnants of long-ago geological activity, the hardened flow of melted and pulverized and reassembled rocks. They provide a sort of snapshot, a moment of timeless motion frozen in time. But they too are only traces of what really was.

I think of the ending of "What I Expected," by Stephen Spender:

Expecting always
Some brightness to hold in trust
Some final innocence
Exempt from dust,
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all
Like the created poem,
Or the faceted crystal.

That exemption from dust is what I'm always hoping for, but no longer expect.