Though I love walking on our street, or on the hiking trail, my legs are about shot. We are old, three of our dogs and myself. Simon used to come to the door and bark to be let in; now he barks from the bottom of the three steps leading up to our covered deck. It is as if it hurts to do three steps. He barks, I go out, he usually runs up the steps. It is very odd, but then dachshunds are very odd.
Frollie has more trouble getting up from lying down than I do. And Dexter? Dexter is almost totally deaf, arthritic and lame like Frollie and me. Heaven help us.
Yesterday, Saturday, was a clear day, an incredible blue-sky day. I decided to walk a half mile in the subdivision, to the end of Fairway where it meets Forest, then all the way back to the circle and then home: one half a mile. Before I went out to get the paper and the mail, I chose a coat for the day, actually, a fleece-lined L.L.Bean shirt. I had kept it hanging in my bedroom closet for its first year, but the shirt is so warm it is like wearing a blanket, and I never wore it much in the house So, about a week ago I moved it to our downstairs closet where most of my coats and jackets hang. I thought I would give it a try yesterday, for it seemed like a good day for wearing a blanket.
The shirt is beautiful, a red and black houndstooth pattern, but I wasn't thinking about the pattern at the beginning of the walk, only the warmth for the temperature was in the forties. However, the minute I walked outside everything changed. I stepped into brilliant sunshine and clear blue sky. I happened to look down at the arm of my shirt and saw that the shirt was transfigured, it glistened in the sunlight. I looked down at the front of the shirt and it to glistened and shone in the bright light. Hanging in my closet, the shirt seemed ordinary enough, nothing special, but in the sunlight the patterned shirt was absolutely gorgeous. And then I made another discovery about the day itself.
This was a Kentucky spring day ahead of spring. The sky was a brilliant blue, the kind of deep blue that makes me ache to contain it, to take it inside with me and somehow keep it. I can see the same sky from my window now, just a deep blue in a cloudless sky that seems to go on forever. Now, I am one who believes there are no accidents, even when I am having one, like getting hit by a car in my own driveway. In this case, the night before yesterday, I was reading in the Malcolm Guite book, A Word in the Wilderness and discovered a relevant passage in one of his own poems, a poem he had written about venturing outside on crutches in early spring after being closed up all winter. The poem is entitled, "First Steps, Brancaster," and begins,
This is the day to leave the dark behind you
Take the adventure, step beyond the hearth,
Shake off at last the shackles that confined you,
And find the courage for the forward path.
A promising beginning for a poem for the Saturday in the first week of Lent, for of course Lent is itself a forty day journey, certainly an interior journey if not an exterior one. The thing is, in the second stanza of this three stanza poem there is an image that I remembered during my Saturday walk that seemed to capture my experience with that particular day. I shall quote the second ten-line stanza, in its entirety, though I really hate copying things, as do my hands:
After the dimly burning wick of winter
That seemed to dull and darken everything
The April sun shines clear beyond your shelter
And clean as sight itself. The reed-birds sing,
As heaven reaches down to touch the earth
And circle her, revealing everywhere
A lovely, longed-for blue.
Breathe deep and be renewed by every breath,
Kinned to the keen east wind and cleansing air,
As though the blue itself were blowing through you.
The stanza reaches a moment of special emphasis with the wonderful phrase of the half line, "a lovely, longed-for blue" period. The poem stops for a moment to allow us, possibly, to take a breath as the language and alliteration tie the breath to the blue, focus the literal wind that may become an image itself of spirit, as it is in the Bible, moving us then to the climactic, marvelous final line, fusing sky and wind and self into an arresting insight, linked by the rhyme of blue and you and the alliteration with blowing.
I remembered reading the poem the night before as I walked under our blue sky on this early March day with a brisk west wind ablowing. In a sense the poet gave me a way to capture the blue of the sky, internalize it, and bring it inside, so to speak. As I said, there are no accidents. Of course, Freud said that too, meaning something far different from what I mean, I think.
I was about to say how everything here ties together, but I have forgotten. All I remember is the way in which the sunlight creates the color of the sky and intensifies the color of the shirt, giving it a heretofore unimagined beauty, and transforming the entire day and all the things in it: the details like the glowing white pine needles, the glistening dew on the grass, the bright flashes of light as the sun reflects off the pieces of quartz in our yard, and sparkles in the water running down our concrete gutter, eventually to the creek that flows beside and below us. And while I was looking up, I saw a high-flying jet plane leaving a short white streak behind it against the intense blue when suddenly, the sunlight hit the side of the plane just right and made a bright reflected splash in the sky. A Perfect Close to the walk, a final image. Apparently, however, as I see on the national news, winter gloom and doom surround us, but they are not here today.
Oh, and way back close to before I caught a second baby possum in our upstairs hallway. The dogs were on to him but I got there first. Details. The way in which God speaks to us? How do we understand them? Perhaps we ask the poets.