June
The Garden
“June, June, I beg your pardon, for walking in your garden” is a phrase from an old song, which expresses the delicacy you might feel on some moonlit night about treading a path through fragile shadows and flowers, or intruding by day on their young beauty. The song expresses it succinctly; but the fact of the matter is that the June garden is suddenly so rich and widespread that there are no paths to walk on. It is unavoidable. I find myself wondering how it happened—how it happened that I now take it for granted. My small daughter asked me the other day whether or not the trees wore leaves in the wintertime. She was not quite sure. We have come back to fruition unawares.
The effort has been made, the strength achieved. In the past three months we have gone from death to birth, to unfettered growth, and have already forgotten what a great and elaborate process it was. I can remember—or I have it in writing (the aid to memory)—that on the twenty-fifth of March there was a light snow in the morning, and that the temperature was well below freezing, with strong north winds all day. The significance of the twenty-fifth comes from its often being used as an average date for the first sound of the spring peepers. That day the whole idea seemed impossible. And yet they sang, two evenings later. Of course the whole year is the scene of birth and growth. Spring is not the sole custodian of arrival. There are flowers that bloom in the autumn. But that was our last beginning, in immediate terms. We have lived through what followed with only the scantiest kind of recognition, to arrive now with a great new crowd of shapes and sounds filling the distance, in the muscular swing of light. Flowery grasses, wild flowers like vetch, daisies, coreopsis, buttercups, and hundreds of others, head up, shoot forth, dance in the sun and compete with one another for living space—part of the rush and race of life we take for granted. The fact that we do take it for granted may be the best proof of our deep connection with it, as with all the natural rounds of the year. We breathe and give birth and die in terms of the same force as these surroundings. It is less articulate with us than realized. The new measures have a steady underlying order which pulses in us like the tides. So I suddenly look around me and find the whole earth peopled with motion and quantity, searching and adjustments, and I find it familiar.
In the warm air the land seems bound together by a whir ticked off in the grass by field crickets, lighted at night by the slow-dancing fireflies, intensified on the millions of new leaf surfaces, petals, and stems, where insects alight, crawl, and eat, many races pursuing their separate ways, aligned with thousands of life communities in function and in act.
June has gone green, with a staggering assumption of authority. The dry land ferns stretch stiff and wide like fans. The huckleberry bushes are springing with light green. The oaks heave and rise with their bounty of fresh leaves. Meadows along the shore are green with samphire; and marsh grasses, still low, looking close-cropped above the dark peat or through rushing waves at high tide.
On the lee side of a stone jetty thrusting out from the shore the water is full of plankton. Tiny marine animals, like barnacle larvae, copepods, baby jellyfish, are being gently carried and lifted by the surf. They are whirled and drifted in the water as it swells and ebbs. There is a beautiful symmetry in these fragile, transparent animals. I notice tiny beads of air along the sides of some of the jellyfish.
In some inland waters joined by inlets to the sea, there are massive numbers of adult jellyfish at this time of year, pulsing slowly through green waters, like transparent animal flowers. The riches of the water, fresh or salt, are immeasurable.
More and more adult alewives are returning to the sea after spawning in ponds and lakes, running back through marsh lands filled with cattails, wild iris, rushes, and arrowheads. Behind them they leave their progeny, which have in fact been hatching out for the past two months, and are gradually becoming so numerous as to interfere with the sport of fishing. These “bait fish” feed bass, pickerel, and perch, which now refuse to react to a mere fly or worm, having more than enough to eat.
There are no waters, no wood or square yard of ground not sounding and moving with new life. A wild readiness, a fluency is here. Within its terrestrial order and confinement everything seems incalculably bold. Now is the time to run ahead. Now, even for our special race, is the time to take the necessary risk of new connections, new affinities. This is a world of alliances.
I walk through a wood of trees—which might be in Cape Cod, Japan, or Siberia—their gray trunks spotted with dancing shadows, a naked wealth in motion, thinking that a man might find himself for the first time in this company, not because of would-be similarities—sap and blood, branches and arms—but because of a context which they share. I am an organism that can make a choice. The tree is not; nor can it suffer. To simplify the matter too much, I am an animal. The tree is a plant. But in the whole environment, with its intertwining events, its varying energies, each form of life joins and takes part. In this wood, while the wind blows across us and yellow light dances through, I think that even a man and trees, with their vastly different responses, may be together, players in a sunlight game.