Grimness--and oh, oh, its antithesis.

My heart keeps breaking for the beautiful trees the cold caught in bloom. All over town, and all over the next town over, and all over the road in between, the flowering trees look like this one. Look back to last April if you want to know what we're losing.

But thanks to some truly excellent news about my flaming-sworded friend, at least my heart isn't breaking in all ways tonight. Just the opposite: as I wrote a few weeks ago, the only thing more fun than getting a job (or an award) of one's own is having one's friends get jobs or awards. And she's just gotten a big one, and lots of people are going to be the better for it. Send up a great rejoicing!

Tonight, on the other hand:

Oh, I spoke too soon last night. Considering the lilies of the field, the trees of the village, the things that leaf and bloom, and how they grow--tonight, such considering requires that I consider early, unwarranted death. The magnolia blooms that had popped earlier this week were wilting and rotting this morning; the daffodils have collapsed under the snow that still covered the ground when I woke up and that flew in the whipped wind all day; the hyacinths are toppling. Tonight, I start to be afraid of what will happen if the temperature goes too low, if we bottom out under 20˚ the way the weather forecast suggests we might.

How much worse would it have been, then, had my developing this afternoon actually gone as badly as it seemed ready to, at one point. Purple streaks on developed film: today I learned that this means that the film hasn't been fixed properly. I also learned that it's possible to go back to the fix step and do the second half of the film processing again. But as I watched 72 images of my Lexingtonian friend--her belly, her hands, her profile, her smile--floating in the fix and didn't see the purple streaks going away, I started to worry. "I hate to ask it," I said to my lovely photography professor, "but what if this doesn't work?" "I was just starting to think that myself," she said. "Then, I think we'll go to plan B, which I'll make up in about a minute." Fortunately, we didn't need a backup plan.

And fortunately, I took the time to take pictures of the first magnolia blooms before the freeze blew in. I am meditating the text that will go with the next photo project. These days, I'm thinking so much about what happens when development doesn't go as we hope it will; I might as well use these pictures to play that thinking out in semi-public.

Today, I didn't really have the heart to step out into the cold with the camera and shoot the things that are dying in the cold. Tonight, I'll just let you imagine them.

How they grow.

"Winter is upon us again," says his e-mail, the message that finally goads me to do it--to look back to last year and see just when it was that the temperature plunged at midday, taking us down from the 60s to the 40s in the space of just a couple of hours. Just as I thought: April 3. It happens yearly. We live in Ohio. It's not that winter is upon us again. It's that an Ohio spring works this way: a plunge forward, a plunge back. The crossing and clashing of seasons. It's nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, nothing but the subject matter for small talk, nothing but a provocation (if you'll have it) to savor what is warm and glowing whenever and wherever it turns up. The crabapple buds grew more today; the magnolia tree continued to bloom, a few more flowers at a time, a week earlier this year than last. If they're not complaining, then I'm not either. Consider the lilies (or, in this case, the trees) of the field.

* * *

Oh, oh, and also!!!

If you've ever wanted an awesome necklace, whether for yourself or someone else, you might want to hurry over to Superhero Designs, Andrea Scher's amazing jewelry site. Right about this time last year, I was preparing for class in the bookstore and decided to take a break and poke around on the web. I couldn't even reconstruct for you how it is that I made my way to Superhero Designs, but I sure am glad I did, especially since the necklace I ordered proceeded to sell out. Andrea had a beautiful baby son in December and has been on maternity leave since late fall. Just today, she's announced that she's back in business--but only for a limited time. She sells gorgeously funky jewelry and kickass t-shirts. And she posts unbelievably cute pictures of her unbelievably cute son on her blog. So go already.

On a night like this one.

You will remember the mown grass's humid smell gusting into the car as you drove southward, and again as you drove back from spring and found yet more spring waiting for you at home. You will remember it when you hear a far-off sound of cricketsong, far enough away that it might not be sounding at all, might be just your wanting's tuned to a warmer month. When you look up to the edge of dusk, the shadows that wave will be thickening. The ends of some branches will have burst by day. The world cannot contain itself.

A boy's hand will make a sudden xylophone of a picket fence.

In the darkness you will not see the buds you found in the afternoon. And you will say that you do not fear the threatening freeze, that the wind that blows tonight carries no scent of snow, brings still exhalations of the ground's new warmth.

Still you will have brought inside armloads of flowers, explosions, burstings. Your vases can barely contain them. They will tide you over if the weather cannot hold. Still you will worry about your flowering trees. Still you will wonder whether everything will survive.

On a night like this one, you will think about walking away and not coming back for a long time. You will want to carry yourself off to the prairie with your long stride, to see whether it's really been burned, whether you really missed it, what it looks like now, blackened darker than dark. You will decide not to go, but you will have gone anyway, gone without going. You will have found that ash field, smelled the destruction you cannot see, caught to yourself the new growth heralded. "Why do they burn it?" she has asked. You have answered, knowing that you do not know, and telling that you do not know: "To get the dead growth out."

On a night like this one, you will see no stars on your walk home. You will steer by the sound of your steps.

(Also, how can I not have told you this yet? Happy National Poetry Month! And we have a specific person--in addition to all those centuries of poets--to thank for it. I know her, even if you don't. Good work, you!)

Gorgeousness again.

I am so tired. It's just that simple.

And a postscript, because my friends keep me honest: indeed there was (if I may say so myself) the beauty of the pie. My foodie Lexingtonian stocks better flour than I do, and so the crust was better than usual--real melt-in-your-mouth stuff. I predict that her dogs will look up again for falling raw pie dough the next time they hear a high-pitched "Oh no!" from me. Because I made that noise as I threw pieces of raw pie dough at them, see, because they love to eat it. As who wouldn't. Good times.

It was this kind of day.

Yesterday, I was just plain tuckered out from driving 250 miles and then enjoying my wonderful Lexington friends' dinner party, which featured an abundance of homemade Schezuan food and delicious wine. Tonight, I find myself not entirely in love with the idea of writing very much, something I can only attribute to having had an excellently long and full day of reading, eating, shopping, and photographing. Part of me wants to read three more pages of my book about mesmerism and then fall fast asleep, but part of me wants to write. I'm going to indulge the latter part.

Usually, I try to be at least a little veiled when I tell you about people I know and/or love. But it's tough to veil the extraordinariness that's happening down here in Kentucky. My Lexingtonian friend is having a baby, and she's close enough to due that she can say, "Feel here!" and we can pat a knee, or a bum, or a foot. She is rounded and luscious and absolutely gorgeous. You can't even imagine how gorgeous this woman is. I'm just trying to bask in the glory beaming off of her this weekend. I'm like a little moon. With a camera.

Today, after she had a nap after our Japanese lunch (and I can't stop to sing the praises of raw fish right now, but know that I would, I would), we went out to find clothing for the rest of her pregnancy. Of this trip, I will show you one image, simply because of the bizarre baby portrait topping it off. I know that a baby wrangler was involved in this shot:

Actually, because I have no self-restraint, I'll give you one more image from the trip--partly because it encapsulates the thing that such abundance of tiny clothing does to me. I stood fingering one of these little blue hats and thinking, oh, this is the sweetest thing. I wanted to have one. Not a child, mind you. A little blue hat. To put on a sweet child. I don't particularly want to have my own children, but I would like to be able to spend more time with the sweet children my beautiful friends are having. And to put little blue hats on them.

This shopping trip was one major order of business for today. The other major order of business was a multi-stage photo shoot whose results I will work with in the photo lab when I return to Gambier. May I say that you all should be so lucky as to have such a beautiful pregnant friend as I have.

And what things we have to look forward to as spring streams northward. My mother said to me the other day, "The redbuds will be blooming when you get to Kentucky." And indeed she was right. But I think she kept reminders of the dogwoods to herself so that I'd have the pleasure of discovering their blooms when I got here.

And even dusk looks prettier over a house of friends.

Two thousand words.

As I start nodding off over the computer, a train pulls its loud, low whistle, and I remember another reason I like this other town, in this other state.

New Age Gifts is next door to a kitchen supply store that is having a Scale Sale.

About thirty minutes from home, I saw a massive cow with her head buried, all the way, in a massive pile of hay. And birds galore. Further from home: flowers that won't bloom in Gambier until next week or, more likely, much later.

The beauty of the restaurant.

I will gladly call a restaurant beautiful.

I will call a restaurant beautiful if I can wake up to a sunny warm morning and grin in my myopia at the thought of having enough money in my checking account today to afford dinner at that restaurant on its fourth open day. I will call it beautiful if, as the temperature goes up and the sun stays high and bright, I keep looking forward to 5:30 and sitting in a bar booth and trying red wines. I will call it beautiful if it gives me a reason to drag the wicker chair outside into the sun, push up my t-shirt sleeves, roll my jeans to my knees, and try to freckle. I will call it beautiful even if I have to cut short a sunny phone call with my extraordinary brother, just so I can dig out a dress and a lipstick and a pair of hose and a pair of heels.

I will call it beautiful if it gets me to wear heels. I will call it beautiful if it gives me a reason to wear a dress.

I will call it beautiful when it has my excellent friend and me walking past the students and their bikes, getting ready for Critical Mass in front of the bookstore. I will call it beautiful when two of those students show up in jeans and t-shirts to have cans of PBR at the high table behind us, after we've gotten to the restaurant, as we're drinking $4 glasses of wine.

I will call it beautiful when a former student's mother nearly falls over and saves herself with the back of my dinner chair, and then comes back to tell me that she does remember who I am, after her mohawked rugby player son's arrival reminds me of who she is.

I will call any restaurant beautiful that serves me a mojito torte for dessert. I will call it beautiful if the steak I'm served bleeds when I slice into it. I will call it beautiful even if I wish there had been a shiraz on the menu, and dinner rolls on the table, and even if they put my steak on someone else's bill.

I will call it beautiful because it was a place that was open and not even this nice the last time I lived in Gambier, and because tonight it was full and because its very presence made everyone inside an openly grinning full fool. Because we can walk to a good restaurant now. Because it is not yet a restaurant where anyone has had a hiring committee dinner. Because there were students, and parents, and colleagues, and neighbors, and children, and friends. Because it gave me a place to have a large meal with people I love. Because it is where I live.

I will call it beautiful because it makes me glad to be in my village.

Why I am glad I had the camera fixed.

I have just three things to say tonight:

(That last one is what I really wanted to tell you.)

My postscript about the heron and the four miniature geese I saw flying over the prairie at sundown will have to wait until tomorrow.

Compensatory glories.

I discovered four tiny daffodils. They were blooming in the front yard's ground cover. I cut them, put them in a tiny turquoise vase. I contemplated thievery: my neighbor has hundreds of these tiny daffodils. "Do you call them jonquils?" someone asked when I arrived at the officehouse. "I call them pretty," I told her, because it's been that kind of day. And we laughed, and a breeze picked up outside, and clouds lowered.

In the late afternoon, a lavender crocus might look lunar, might glow against stones and bark. I crouched to the ground--this was before it started to get colder--and shot strange close-ups of these self-envelopers.

In the later afternoon, I found a bird's nest hiding in a forsythia bush. I looked and looked until I saw the way the petals stripe at their joining.

By then the light was low and I wanted to go back to my book. But no, not the book I'm meant to be writing, not just yet. And why should it be so hard to write a book?

Ha. Well.

When one puts it that way, the answer seems clear enough. And so it is that tomorrow, I think, I will try not to write a book but instead to write some pages. I know better than the avoidance tricks I've been pulling with myself of late.

I do not make or provide clip art.

One of the funny things about keeping the Cabinet is that I find myself discerning microtrends in the search words that bring people here. Recently, the hot search seems to be for various forms of clip art. Today alone, I've had people look for "pizza pie clip art," "clip art man woman," "africa tree village clip art," "tractor clip art," and "warrior clip art." Yesterday, "injured bear clip art," "burger clip art," and "cigar clip art." And still more the day before that.

Obviously I know that by using the phrase "clip art" again and again, I'm increasingly the likelihood that someone will turn up here trying in vain to find pieces of it. But at least for the next twenty-four hours, they'll know right away what their prospects are.

Today, so much warmth--so much that I opened the window in the bathroom and didn't even need to close it before I took my morning shower. It's far warmer outside the house than in it, for a little while. I awoke to find daffodils blooming in the backyard and promptly cut most of them and took them to the officehouse.

Today, so many little tasks--taxes, chief among them. I marvel once again this year at the instructions on the back of the 1099-MISC, the ones that tell you what to do if you are "in the trade business of catching fish." I marvel once again at the intricacies of some of the schedules and forms one has to fill out in order to be sure that one doesn't have to file more forms and schedules. And in and amongst these marvels, I marvel at yet another lesson in the practice of unbelievably awkward conversation, talk so shallowed and scraped dry that it leaves me literally incredulous. I have no language for losing an interlocutor, nothing to say in the face of having nothing to say. It's a realization doubly strange on a day so gorgeous that it had us all starting to bare arms and/or legs, or at the very least to say, look, this warmth: the summer decided to arrive already.

Home is a sweet thing.

And so I return, to find that in the five days since I left all the trees have budded, the hills gone over to a reddish hue. (This particular tree happens to be in New York City. But you get my drift.) In the morning, I will check on the trees outside my bedroom and make sure that they're in on the greatness, too.

Spring, here.

In the New Leaf Café, down the hill from the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, was a man with such vivid eyebrows that they alone might compel me to start writing fiction.

And yes, yes, it is true: one can make exotic grilled cheese sandwiches in a George Foreman Grill. (And no, fortunately, this very funny thing is not for real.) And yes, one can eat two grilled cheese sandwiches in one day and still want another. And yes, this small boy is the loveliest of all small boys, particularly when he gets it into his head that he's ready to snuggle and particularly when he splits the labor of completing alphabet and number puzzles. And particularly when he's laughing over silly song lyrics at breakfast. And particularly just always.

And yes, because I know you were wondering: the A train takes 7.5 minutes to go from 125th Street to 59th Street.

Some walls, some windows.

So many things go on here when I am here--a first trip over the Brooklyn Bridge, in a taxi near midnight with all the lights of both boroughs blazing; a small child insisting that I lie down for a nap and let him keep nestling until he gets comfortable enough to recite everything on the ceiling with me; a concert for small people; bagels from the venerable H&H; excellent playground time--that I find myself too tired to write much. Somehow, when I visit the city, I see the things that people who don't live here come here expressly to see, but I always end up seeing them by going about my friends' daily lives, in all their routine and startlingly unroutine details. So: late last night, passing the World Financial Center, I realized that we were taking the West Side Highway right past Ground Zero, a site I had not visited since 2000. Similarly, the new Frank Gehry building going up on the west side, the one that got written up in the Times last weekend: "Hey, there's that Gehry," said my beloved Brooklynite from the back of our cab. Similarly, the Brooklyn Bridge: coming around the Battery and starting up the east side, I suddenly realized our route back to Brooklyn. These are moments of small off-kiltering wonder, as is every moment I feel a Q or B train rumbling along seven or eight stories below where I sit.

Tonight, I'll let these city scraps, some happy accidents from my past twenty-four hours, speak for themselves.

Sixteen (plus twelve) candles.

It is not at all surprising to me that I've seen my first blooming daffodils of the year in a fifth-floor Brooklyn apartment. New York City has always been a city of flowers for me: flowers on our dresses the first time I came to the city and rode the carousel in the Park, before I even knew about the other Park, flowers in front of every street corner shop at every season of the year.

I'm appropriating these flowers because twenty-eight years ago today my parents dropped me at a neighbor's house and went off to Buffalo's Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital and had my brother. (That's Millard Fillmore, not my brother, at the right.) I'm the one who got lucky that day. No one has ever had such a terrifically thoughtful and hilarious brother as I. And I know darned well that most people aren't gifted with siblings they actually want to be near, much less be near for long periods of time. In honor of him and his singular but multi-cameraed way of visioning the world, I'm hoping to blow out an entire memory card this afternoon as I traipse from place to place. And maybe even to make a pilgrimage to the B&H Superstore--or at least the International Center of Photography.

Happy birthday, guy.

*****

Henri Cartier-Bresson's work is genius. If you live within reach of the ICP, go see his Sketchbook.

As I photograph with my little Leica, I have the feeling that there is something so right about it: with the one eye that is closed one looks within. With the other eye that is open one looks without: one sees the shapes, the living quality of what moves one to photograph. Without passion, without working with the emotion of the heart and the enjoyment of the eye, nothing vital can be put down.

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1946

Flight plan.

Do not underestimate the power of flightbound steel. An airplane is no bad place to take a nap; sleep makes a long tarmac wait slip past so that you're awake for the flight itself.

Do not fret about luggage delay, even when you remember that time last April when the airline obviously transferred the bags of no one on your flight.

Love the sunlight. Love the buildings. You can be a real dip in the city, but you like that about yourself, and you're pretty sure you keep it quiet fairly well. Taking pictures from a moving bus: underrated.

Get where you're going. On your way there, see a man sitting centered in the sunny south-facing window of an apartment on 37th Street. He is on the second floor, squared to the window frame, in the sun, looking, just looking.

On your way there, see a boy wearing a t-shirt covered in turntables and boomboxes. See a girl wearing a plum-colored dress and a short black jacket. See the boy who tends to the girl, brushing and picking things from her jacket. See the sleeping man who wakes just enough to cough and cough and cough.

Get where you're going. Find yet another train there. Find the small boy who loves trains, and his parents. Let the small boy crash into the backs of your legs to give you a hug. Let him lean on you at a jaunty angle. Sing him a song about a bus. Tug his curls when he's not looking. Learn your ABCs all over again. Learn the sibilance of "slip," "sip," "sleep" in his favorite book. Learn yet again how to eat artichokes. Think of the trains you will feel in your sleep.

No snow on these flowers.

And I am taking this as a good omen for the year, in all manner of things.

Birds in the off hours.

It was a beautiful day, the kind of sunny that teases and tricks this time of year. All day I kept feeling sure that I'd be able to ditch my coat sometime soon. All day I was wrong.

At about 6:45 p.m. I headed out to see what I could see. Surprisingly, what rose to my view again and again were unexpected birds:

a vulture taking off from a tree (turns out those circling birds weren't hawks after all, a thing one might think I'd know by now)

that same vulture, flying away

geese in a field (I think these are the same ones I saw last week, though I have no real basis for that thought)

and even a heron.

These three were only the tiniest fraction of the birds I encountered--the birds I, for the most part, frightened all the way through my walk in the environmental center's prairie. No matter how quietly I tried to tread, hoping to get a better look at which birds were sending up which songs, the birds inevitably heard me and popped out to another thornbush, another curled fall of whispering grass. And so standing still and looking up had to do, for tonight. Sooner than I'd have expected, it was enough that they were everywhere to be heard while I tried to get the best silhouettes I could.

And tonight let me be a lesson to you--though this one might be confusing and/or convoluted because I'm still trying to work it out for myself. On my way back up the hill, thinking about how beautiful this place where I live is, I turned around a couple of times to look back at the valley I was leaving. Each time I looked back, it was more lovely than the time before, until suddenly I looked back and up at the same time and found the moon slivering its way back from newness (accompanied by no less than Venus, which will serve as first star seen tonight if it's all right with everyone here).

Now, I'll admit to having looked back a lot lately. Longtime readers will remember that precisely this time last spring brought a series of lovely strangenesses into my life, and as I tick past a series of one-year anniversaries, I can't help but think about what a peculiar twelve months I've had. And once I've called them peculiar--sometimes very sweetly so, and sometimes downright terribly--I don't have much more to say about them; it hasn't been a year for feeling as though I've figured very many things out. In fact, it feels as though the opposite of figuring things out has been taking place at every turn: it's as though this year has been designated the year of unraveling.

On the other hand, unraveling isn't always a negative thing. All manner of things are knitting up with my being now in ways that they weren't even a year ago. Last March 21, I stopped in town to get my mail on the way home after a truly uncanny experience with a body of work that I now know much more fully, and because snow had fallen on that first day of spring, covering all our crocuses, I stooped in the blue evening to take pictures of those other bluenesses: dusky snow, dusted flowers. Back then, I still felt a bit self-conscious about all the pictures I was taking. And look at me now--or, perhaps, look at me looking back at my looking and how it has changed.

What I'm trying to say is that looking back isn't always a negative thing, either. Of course I believe this, being a scholar of memory. There's a crucial difference between reflection and regret. I'm seeking my balance point between them these days.

Of the many things that have not changed in the past year, at least one can manifest itself in a photograph: once again--though he has faded ever so slightly--the dragon welcomes you to spring.

And back once again.

The weather and all signs were pointing in one direction: I suppose I should have known, when I was still very close to my parents' house, how the end of this day would turn out to feel--an excellent job talk and an excellent hanging about with good friends notwithstanding. But I'm tired, and I'm willing to peg most of my current feeling on that fact.

And then I think, well: even if it's not just that I'm tired, even if (say) it's something about being back here right at this minute that's making me feel less than buoyant, it's not necessarily a terrible thing. I'm only touching down briefly. But oh, how much of your life have you lived that way, letting present ills go simply because you know you're going to change your scenery in fairly short order? Somehow it doesn't seem like any way to live. And the fact that my left hand just hit an "o" instead of an "i," slipping in "any way to love" when I intended to say "any way to live"--well, that doesn't make anything any easier, frankly.

Seriously, how would you feel if last night (sometime after you took advantage of her deafness and clandestinely caught this photo) this dog managed, somehow, to grab your right hand between her front paws and fall asleep with her head pillowed on your arm, as though she really cared you were there, as though you really mattered to the quality of her sleep and of her well-being in general?


It's hard to leave the ones who love you.

More blossoms and blueness.

About the day I've had with my parents, drinking too much coffee and eating Italian food for lunch and tracing out the lineaments of deep, startling disappointment and acquiring new semi-necessaries at a variety of stores and watching a Top 100 Songs of the 1980s countdown for hours and hours with a deaf dog at my feet--about this day and what it has meant, there are few words.

We visited a snake at a pet store. We three gathered around the glass tank wherein the snake coiled loosely, and when it shifted, I jumped a little. It raised up its head and reared its neck up into the air, and we stroked the glass and flickered our tongues in greeting. Later my mother and I watched a moustached parakeet long enough that my father left the store without us and stood in the sun outside until we realized he'd gone. "We were trying to get the bird to come down," we said.

Now the dog is sleeping, her legs kicked out over my legs. Now I too will sleep.

This place's quiet is utterly different from that other one's. And this will be a week of at least four different quiets: I'm on the move no small amount in the next seven days. Which is a good thing, I think, because otherwise I might find myself spending a lot of time back in Ohio yearning for my maples to start doing what this tree has been up to.