Tomorrow’s full Blue Moon is reportedly one of the most powerful for manifesting, whatever you might take that to mean. It’s simultaneously one of shedding, where you can let go of whatever is holding you back. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a little Blue Moon, even if it is full.
This is the second full moon of May, which may explain the craziness some of us have been feeling this entire month. The past few days it’s been nothing but red lights, crazy drivers, computer cock-ups, and a bunch of things that went balls-up. If we can move the blame to the moon, maybe it’s not us. If we can harness some lunar energy in the process, so much the better.
This spring I didn’t go overboard with our patio planting scheme. A few salvias and hummingbird favorites – which are working as we’ve already seen our first hummingbird of the season – a pot of papyrus (with the drainage holes mostly blocked to keep its feet wet) – and a few pots of colorful annuals, including this little purple guy, are about all I could muster.
Missing are our usual showstoppers like petunias and coleus and sweet potato vines, so this purple beauty will have to put on the brunt of the floral fireworks, along with a lone begonia. This sleepy spring has been slow to wake – no word on whether summer will follow suit.
It’s a little too early for a tender song called ‘Nightswimming’ – that comes later, when we’re nearer to September. For now, another R.E.M. beauty – ‘At My Most Beautiful’ which almost matches the tenderness of ‘Nightswimming’.
I’ve found a way to make you I’ve found a way A way to make you smile
I read bad poetry Into your machine I save your messages Just to hear your voice You always listen carefully To awkward rhymes You always say your name Like I wouldn’t know it’s you At your most beautiful
Once upon a Boston autumn, I listened to this song right around the time I started dating a sweet boy. We would last for almost two years, and I’d move halfway across the country for him, only to come back heartbroken and alone before we had the chance to share another spring together. We were so young, so hopeful, so unrocked by the world at that point. Still, we weren’t meant to be, and we couldn’t keep it together. He was brave enough to say so; I was brave enough to accept it without a brutal fight. This song brings me back to our beginning – a little slice of happiness and heaven.
I remember sitting on the bed in my Boston place as the sun came in through the bay window. Fall was at hand, but it held on to the warmth of summer, the way cities sometimes hold that season’s heat well into October. Suzie was visiting and we sat on the bed catching up. Nervous to tell her about him, the way I would always be when introducing my boyfriends to her, my giddiness overrode the nerves and I remember smiling like a fool the entire time. The first inklings of love are unmistakable, and so adorably fun; I just wanted to share the feeling, to shout it and declare it and let the whole world know. It was easy to fall in love then, at least for me; my friends were much wiser – safer, too – but I didn’t care. Recklessly, ruinously, ridiculously, I would fall over and over and over again. And it was always worth it – if only for a season or two.
At my most beautiful I count your eyelashes secretly With every one, whisper, “I love you” I let you sleep I know your closed eye watching me Listening I thought I saw a smile
Lately I’ve been looking at long-ago romances and revisioning the hurt I felt at the end of any number of relationships. The endings usually left me sad and bereft, and in sadness there was bitterness. That’s not how I want to remember those love affairs, and so I’m shifting my view of them, choosing instead to remember how wonderful they were in their respective sections of my life. Hence the sweet song of this post, and the revelations – literal and metaphorical – of now and then.
I’ve found a way to make you I’ve found a way A way to make you smile
My father’s resting place may house his ashes, but I don’t usually feel his spirit there. That’s partly why I don’t visit it that often, choosing to mostly mark his birthday or holidays with a stop-by, and not much else. I feel him elsewhere – in the garden, on a warm breeze, in the shadow of a a tree. Lately I’ve been missing him so I stopped by his grave to say hello. The stone was warm from a day of sun, and flags lined the place in honor of Memorial Day. A few other cars with visiting loved ones of lost ones were scattered throughout the place, but none in my vicinity. As is usually the case, I didn’t feel my father there.
Even in the shade of a row of ancient evergreens, where he might have been found on a hot day, my father was missing. I looked for him briefly, knowing he wouldn’t be there, and hoping that it was the looking that mattered. As is often the case, I drove away from the cemetery feeling empty, feeling robbed of something, feeling the fact of my father’s absence. And as is occasionally the case, I wasn’t ready to let him go, so I drove to the place where I’ve gone whenever I find myself missing him: St. Mary’s Hospital. My Dad’s most regular ‘office’, where he’d be at work at all days of the day or night trying to save someone’s life and make the world better for other families, the hospital is where I remember my Dad being at key points in life.
I always return to the same space near the entrance of the cafeteria, before a locked door of offices now, but which once housed a conference room where my Dad kept me when I came home early from school one day and he had to be at the hospital. My social anxiety had worked and wreaked its havoc, and I couldn’t handle being at school with the other kids anymore that day – I thought I just missed my parents, and this was the only way to be close to them. I’d expected Dad to be angry for me making him have to pick me up early, the same way I expected him to be angry when I broke one of the garden sprinklers as a child, but he was gentle with me that day, perhaps sensing that I was only there out of fear. The memory recedes at that point, fading away to a slight ache, an emptiness. But I felt my father’s presence there, in those halls he walked, near those vending machines that offered the sandwiches he’d get when his work required him to stay beyond any sort of reasonable hours. I could hear his laughter with Hector the head janitor, his joking with the OR nurses, and his caring comfort for a little boy who mustered all his effort not to cry from missing his parents and growing up.
How strange that such a pretty flower elicits such difficult thoughts. Try getting your head around something like the multiverse. Younger people do it with ease, but they’re afraid of other things. Older people can make sene of it if they think long enough on it, but who wants to think very long on anything these days? For those of us somewhere in the middle – of life, of death, of the past and present – there’s something between grace and acceptance, a balance that is precariously perched on the bloom of the columbine, and such prettiness was never meant to last.
Returning from Maine, the road turned from rainy to sunny.
Summer whispered on the scattered days when the temperature reached into the 80’s.
In some cities there is already the bane of a heatwave, driving the warmth into the concrete, into the labyrinthine subway stations, into the headache-inducing unbearable afternoons where the only relief is in a cold shower, in lying very still as a fan does its damnedest to no real avail.
How far will it take us, how hot will it get, and how will we get there from here? Impossible to make out the twists and turns to come, even if the end – the destination – is in the beginning, in those earliest days of spring, when houses of glass and green gave the only glimpses of hope on those nights still so cold.
This is the time of the year when a little linden tree grove near my office building comes into its own, budding with the inconspicuous green blooms that will soon shower the area with its gorgeous perfume. No one gives the linden tree its props, mostly because no one knows that it’s the source of such enchanting fragrance. I also happen to enjoy being one of the only people I know who love the linden tree – like some little secret known only to me, so no one else can ruin it. The last thing I want to see is the linden tree go the way of the Bradford pear – overexposure never helped anyone.
The next few weeks will find these trees in bloom – seek one out and sit beneath its bee-buzzing brilliance – it’s the perfect welcome for summer.
When the burdens of basic life become too much, and in this present moment of world history, it is most decidedly too much, I find it helpful to take a pause and make a cup of tea: for the ritual, for the meditative moment, and for the calming effects of chamomile coziness.
Our Memorial Day weekend in Maine closed with a full day and night of rain, which also made a mess of things on the first part of the ride home. Still, there is something romantic about the rain, and leaning into that aspect of a rainy ride made for a balm on a scary rainy day Monday. You don’t get a double-downer like that all too often, and perhaps that’s the reason for my melancholy of late. We usually get more sun than we’ve had, and maybe that’s contributing to it as well.
When my fifth grade year started at McNulty Elementary School, we had a rainy stretch of a few days when we were cooped up inside, beneath the florescent lights of grade school design, and for some reason the idea of the rain forcing us together indoors felt safe and comforting. When it broke days later, and we were allowed to go outside for recess, I reluctantly joined everyone outside, when I still wanted us to all be together indoors. (Yes, I was a strange child.)
My first trip to London was blessedly rain-free, but for a second excursion there, on my own, it rained for some of the trip, and, having expected it as part of London’s charm, I flipped open an umbrella and went about my business, ducking into pubs when it got heavy, having a cup of tea when it got cold, and waiting it out always seemed to work. There was a cozy romanticism to rain in London, one that I still hold close to my heart.
For several vacations in Ogunquit, it rained for the entire time – and not just showers – heavy, down-pouring rain with driving wind that made any sort of outdoor walk impossible. We had to miss the Marginal Way for a few of those vacations because it simply wasn’t possible – but somehow it was always all right.
Rain is a part of life, and I’m learning to embrace it.
A weekend in Maine has come to a rainy close, and while my mind processes rejoining the working masses, this post is just to mark time with its brilliant begonia blooms. The patio plantings went in a little later than usual, and the cool weather we’ve had hasn’t really inspired them with much confidence, but the plants will catch up when the sun and warmth do. I’m placing my faith in the universe to nudge us along to where we are supposed to be.
