Blossoms

Elizabeth Barrett Browning said it best: "Earth's crammed with Heaven, / And every common bush afire with God."

Blossoms, big and small, dot our landscape.

Life slows to a saunter at the beach.

Look around; and along with blue skies and waters, seek the Creator's handiwork.

Puffs of fuchsia rhododendrons color our world.

Alongside a stone wall, violet blossoms light up the roadway.

Pink beach roses thrive amid rounded beach stones.

Bunches of white flowers reach for the sky.

Daffodils burst with buds of yellow.

Tiny purple flowers hide in sandy beach soil.

‘Till even the comforting barn grows far away’

A view of our barn from the house during Friday's storm.

Surveying the damage from yet another nor’easter, I think we were pretty lucky.

A tree near the dog kennel snapped from the burden of snow and tug of wind.

The accordion truck bed cover on the Dodge Ram collapsed from the massive weight of water, snow and ice.

Looking around the yard, there are so many broken limbs that we’ll have to wait until the snow melts to unearth them. Two logs still cling to the snow-covered roof from the last storm.

Yet overall, we view this latest onslaught by Mother Nature as just another chapter of this highly unpredictable winter.

Shoveling the brick front stairs and path to the driveway, I have plenty of time to think about the extra work and hardship the recent bouts of wild weather have caused: days without power, a dwindling wood pile, empty cupboards, traffic accidents, coastal flooding, downed trees, delays and loss of wages.

But as I see the artistry around me, the puffy white cotton clinging to tree branches, dusting evergreens and creating fields of virgin snow, I am spellbound by its beauty.

The sky is blue, the air crisp and clean. Everything sparkles wearing its fresh new coat of snow.

A few years ago I spent some time at The Frost Place, Poet Robert Frost’s 1915 farm homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire.

Tucked in the White Mountains, the house offered a spectacular view; but as I gazed from his covered porch in October, I pictured what it looked like in winter.

Off the beaten path or in the words of the poet, somewhere along “the road not taken,” this place must have been cut off from civilization in wintertime.

Many of his poems are set in this remote backdrop, including “Dust of Snow,” “Fire and Ice,” “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter,” “The Mountain,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “Snow,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “A Winter Eden” and “The Wood-Pile.”

But Frost, who was aptly named, also felt the dread of a nor’easter. He captured these feelings in “Storm Fear”:

“How drifts are piled, / Dooryard and road ungraded, / Till even the comforting barn grows far away, / And my heart owns a doubt / Whether ‘tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided.”

'All's right with the world'

It was a most unusual sound. I awoke to the music of falling rain rhythmically pelting the rooftop.

It had been a long time.

Springtime in New England is the stuff of rain interspersed with occasional sunshine, but this year is different.

The past winter brought us mild, dry days; and nature reacted. There were buds on the daffodils as early as February at the summer house. The azaleas were in full bloom on Easter in the front yard. Barren tree branches burst with blossoms and greenery in April instead of May.

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night,” wrote poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Yet despite the intense beauty of the season, we know that something is amiss when a significant amount of time passes with little or no rain.

Grabbing a handful of soil in my kitchen garden, I notice that it sifts like sand through my fingers.

The songbirds are regular guests at our birdfeeder, instead of fending for themselves on fat, juicy earthworms after a rainstorm.

When will the early morning dew that clings to the grass and vegetation disappear altogether?

So this morning I welcomed the rain like a long lost friend.

“I love the rain,” wrote short-story writer and poet Katherine Mansfield. “I want the feeling of it on my face.”

I imagine the foliage awash with life sustaining sustenance, dry roots soaking in a basin of fresh, cool water.

Standing at the picture window, I watch streams of water running down the street and hear the wind whipping the flag by the front door.

Oblivious to the onslaught, a woodpecker lands on the stump of an old oak tree. The black and white-spotted bird with a red patch on his head starts tapping on the weathered wood and dines on insects in the soup.

Later, I look through the bedroom window and see a wild turkey pecking in the wet grass. Intent on a turkey shoot, I grab my camera.

Quietly, I head out the back door and tip toe around the dog kennel, but the turkey scampers into the woods before I can aim and is gone without a trace.

As I walk back to the house, I notice the springy soft cushion of bright green grass and inhale the earthy scent of a world washed clean.   

I recall the poetry of Robert Browning.

“The year’s at the spring / And day’s at the morn; / Morning’s at seven; / The hillside’s dew –pearled; / The lark’s on the wing; / The snail’s on the horn; / God’s in His heaven  –  / All’s right  with the world!”

A wet world surrounds the summer house in every season.

'I'm nobody. Who are you?'

The daffodils are in full bloom along the stonewall abutting our summer place, sunny yellow beacons of the approaching season. Yet it’s hard to imagine summertime in Tiverton as cold March winds blow.

One of the greatest American poets, New Englander Emily Dickinson wrote: “Dear March, come in! / How glad I am! / I looked for you before. / Put down your hat – / You must have walked – / How out of breath you are! / Dear March, how are you?”

Educated at Amherst Institute and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson was a voracious reader, who spent most of her life in her room. I envision “The Belle of Amherst” with her face pressed against the window, chronicling the seasons as an observer removed from wind, sun and spring rains.

To be a woman and a poet in the mid-1800s placed her outside the bounds of society norms. She sent four of her poems to a literary critic, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who advised her against publishing. During her lifetime only seven of her edited poems were printed without attribution.

By her 40s, the shy Victorian poet refused to leave the house. She died at age 56 in 1886.

Looking through her possessions, her sister Lavinia found hundreds of hidden poems sewn together, scribbled on shopping lists, envelopes and candy wrappers.

Later, Higginson would call her gift “a wholly new and original poetic genius,” according to “Benet’s Readers Encyclopedia.” He heavily edited a book containing a fraction of her poems in 1890.

The first complete edition of Dickinson’s 1,775 poems was published in 1960.

“I’m nobody. Who are you?” she wrote.

In defiance, I wander the beach battered by the spray of wind-tossed waves, propelled by icy blasts.  

Free to roam, I think about the daughter of the orthodox Calvinist, predestined to sit in her room day after day, baring her soul on scraps of paper filled with such words of passion.

“The sky is low, the clouds are mean, / A travelling flake of snow / Across a barn or through a rut / Debates if it will go. / A narrow wind complains all day / How some one treated him; / Nature, like us, is sometimes caught / Without her diadem.”