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The Artist’s
Almanac
April 2010
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April is the cruellest month,
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,
Mixing memory and desire,
Stirring dull roots with spring rain.
-
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
My youngest
granddaughter gave me a survival kit last Christmas. It consists of
a compass, a whistle, a miniature flashlight and a tiny candy bar.
She has been after me ever since to use it. Last Sunday I took her
to the creek to explore.
There we scanned
the gravel beaches, as I once did as a boy, collecting fossils:
brachiopods, cephalopods and crinoid stems, or Indian money,
evidence of life here in shallow seas eons before man came on
earth. This never fails to load me with an awesome sense of
Time, thinking of all that have come and gone here before us.
She was more
interested in the present, wading and sweeping the current with
her butterfly net lest any passing fossils or minnows escape her.
Next we turned to shelling
German Battleships that cruised past disguised as floating
sticks. We looked for crawdads under upturned rocks, but it was
too early yet. I showed her how to use the compass to plot a
bearing and distance to home. Then she hid from me and used the
whistle to help me find her.
Then an ominous growl of an
engine drowned out the chatter of the riffling water. I looked
up to see coming around the bend what did not belong there – a
Jeep plowing downstream splitting the current and muddying the
water. It passed through us, went downstream and turned around
and came back upstream, getting stuck briefly, churning up
gravel, mud and fossils, clouding the clear stream. Our
exploration day on the creek was over.
Fragile and fleeting
as beauty is, how can we be thankful enough for a spring day?
Yet there is a sense of melancholy mixed with it, as, in the
words of the poet we mix memory and desire, stirring dull
roots with spring rain.... As I drag my aching bones over
the sharp rocks looking for fossils and keeping an eye on the
young girl with the big heart in a small body with boundless
energy, I am most conscious of the passing of time and the need
to savor every precious moment of it. We never step twice in the
same stream.
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