February
Secrets in the Open
Rain comes, heavy, cold, inert. Dirt roads begin to turn to mud. Then the vice tightens again. Below freezing temperatures take hold, putting a new strain on plants and trees lately thawed. It is not steady, continuous cold that now threatens life, but the shifts between freezing and thawing—alternates in the caprices of energy. We are not allowed to open our pores and eyes too much, lest we be taken unawares, stopped as we try to start again.
I am hungry for release from winter’s power. I imagine, hopefully, that the buds on the oak trees are a little fatter and the pine needles greener. If everything is ready to bloom when permitted, I am ready to say the word. But in fact the earth turns, and there has been a gradual increase in daylight for two months. The skunk cabbage has already reacted. The conical tips of its buds are pushing through frozen ground, showing that all life is not confined to pumping hearts. The ferment goes on in many ways, although the imperturbable action of a skunk cabbage, following the global year’s own pace, is not something to give me as much cheer as a blue bird’s song.
Zero and subzero weather is unfamiliar on the Cape and when it comes it feels incalculably cold. It is face-burning, dry, and piercing. Icy, crackling abysses hang in the air. There is a fire in a neighboring town. A small clothing store has caught fire in the early morning when the proprietor was away. Leaden gray smoke lifts above it through heavy walls and winds of cold into the sky. A small crowd gathers on the other side of the street. They stamp hard, hold on to their ears, and watch the fire truck hurling tons of water into the black interior of the store, a little yellow frame building with nothing left to it but its name—the letters still showing on a dirty sign above the door.
A stove caused it, they say. They wonder whether the man had any insurance. Was this all he had? They watch in sympathy. They walk away saying: “Who cares!” They laugh, and as the fires show signs of going out, they cry for more. What is there in us that cries out for disaster and responds so readily to accidents?
I hear brutality and kindness, all in the same crowd, cold laughter and silent sympathy. Here are our meetings, all in the one extreme of a winter day, showing the allowances and shifts in human weather... hidden fires almost seen.
In a day’s time the great cold is gone. Frost still lies deep in the ground. The twigs of shrubs and trees shiver wildly and delicately. The sun strikes us more directly. It sheathes the tree tops and a running slate-blue sea, and the day seems more open, receptive to that release I look for; but there might be a magic there that will pass before I find it. I spend as much time stumbling as in discovery, stumbling over debris, cans, and broken glass, like this stretch of drab ground just off the highway, bordering a salt marsh. It has the grim look of scalped ground, having been robbed of its topsoil. The only life is a starling, perched on a bare sumac. At the edge of the marsh I clamber over colorless litter, logs, branches, piles of thatch shoved in and rocked by the tides. Things seem tediously dead.
Something says stand and wait, look out and over; and when I do life stirs, assembles, and flies. The yellow marsh grasses sway beyond me. Ice shines white in the drainage ditches. A flicker, sun loaded, flies over to the far side. Tall dry reeds rattle together.
In silence, a female purple finch lands on a tree facing the wind, its breast shining in the light. I hear the dry “tik” of a myrtle warbler. Then a chickadee swings and loops out of a wind-washed pitch pine above me.
Through the thickets of alder, shad, blueberry, and sumac on the surrounding banks, I become aware of a sweet spring voice, then of small singings here and there, and when I follow them up I realize they come from the shrubs themselves. Twigs rustle and touch. Gray branches out of frozen ground sing in contact. Even the marsh reeds make occasional sharp, squeaking twangs. There is no melody among the birds. A robin, although it is as red as it will ever be in spring, and fatter, with feathers puffed out on the cold, flies to an alder bush, where a few dried berries are still hanging, to perch without a sound.
The music is there, though it may become louder and richer in a later context. Musical capacity is not confined to a few animals, or to spring and summer. Cold air and frost rehearse with plants as well, under the changing sun. The song of light is played in many ways.