It Can Change Your Heart

By Holly Wren Spaulding
Sun contributor
“I never notice flowers,” says Ted. He’s a composer, a musician, and I’m a little baffled by this. “Don’t all artists pay attention to such things.”
I had cut what I could from the droughty garden — the last of the white peonies, some margarita daisies, flowering mint, violets. I hold the black clay vase up to his face, “that’s lemon balm — rub the leaves — can you smell it?” Ted brightens, “I should have more flowers in my life.”

***
Five of us take canoes onto Eagle Lake after dinner. For the first time all day the wind has dropped and the paddling is easy, the beginners are starting to get it. We ramble down toward the neighboring lake, under a wooden bridge, out into the open where we stop, all of us, and listen to the water lapping against the boats.
Tina, a poet from Brooklyn, wonders why she doesn’t find a way to be near water more often. Every morning lately she has been sitting at the end of the dock, watching what happens there: the successions of insects, water lilies opening, loons. She has loaned me a book of poems by Jack Gilbert and I take a chair in the sun on one far end of the old porch. I open to a poem called ‘Burning (Andante Non Troppo)’: “The grand Italian churches are / covered with detail which is visible at the pace / people walk by. The great modern buildings are / blank because there is no time to see from the car. / A thousand years ago when they built the gardens / of Kyoto, the stones were set in the streams askew. / Whoever went quickly would fall in. When we slow, / the garden can choose what we notice. Can change / our heart.”
***
It’s been cool since Wednesday but there is the promise of summer. Especially after several rainy days, things are growing, opening. In the garden peas climb the woven scaffold and will blossom. We have been eating kale, mustards and lettuces every night despite the voles in the garden.
The lake is getting noisier. Already at nine in the morning, a jet ski breaks the silence. Loons are particular about their habitat and move north as humans move in. This lake still hosts at least several of these fascinating birds but their distress call — a quavering tremolo as if from the other side of life — makes me wonder how long they will put up with us.
***
Allen is grating sweet potato for a casserole over the stainless steel island. While setting the table, Laurie finds two beach nut hulls that someone brought back from a hike and takes them to him. “Look, this is what I meant when I told you about beech nuts,” she says. “Well, where’s the nut?” asks Allen, “I can’t do anything with these.” Laurie is quiet, the brown, bristled shapes opening like lotuses in her hand.
***
It’s Sunday morning and we linger over breakfast. My oatmeal grows cold as I lean in to hear Valerie talk about what she’s been noticing in cities — people laid off or pushed out by property taxes until the whole place empties and then the developers retake the avenues, give them new names, put up condominiums. She saw it happen in Baltimore and now in Harlem. I tell her about Detroit where 2 million people once lived and worked and listened to music. Now it’s a city of 900,000 and there are not enough funds to keep the city running properly. Houses are being abandoned, foreclosed, burned down for insurance money. It portends a gutting of communities on a scale that is heretofore unseen. People are losing each other, and where they are from is vanishing. How can we have relationships to a place and bonds that move us to defend them when we keep on moving? Valerie is philosophical though. She knows what it means to have one’s homelands trespassed, stolen, renamed and reinvented.
Much of Valerie’s art tells the story of how this has happened on the African continent. She says, “Even in places where there is a lot of concrete, I see trees and native vegetation.” She says this in all seriousness, and not because she is a denier. A long-lived artist, she is a seer. “This moment is just a moment in time.” She tells us about returning to a little house in the Caribbean and needing to cut her way to the door with her machete after being gone for only a few weeks. She’s trying to soothe us — the younger ones at the table — because she has heard us despairing at the rate at which our culture is bent on subduing the natural. How our culture is responsible for so much displacement.
Not far from where we are sitting is a massive boulder, a glacial erratic. It was deposited here ten to twenty thousand years ago when the ice came down from nearby Blue Mountain. It persists in the humus beside the old stables, which lean crooked and cobwebby, with their old shingles, weathered boards. We’d be kidding ourselves to imagine that what we create will last for very long.
***
Tina says she has never seen a sky so dark, a sky with so many stars. Philipp guides my hand to the focus knob on the telescope, and adjusting it, I can see Venus and its moons. Even in the chill, despite the mosquitoes, we stand a long time looking, and none of us say anything for a while.