Bike on Lane

I can still feel the heft of the old bulkhead door as my sister and I lifted it one day in early April, then scrambled down the cement steps into the dark stone cellar to drag our bicycles, all cobwebby and coal-dusted, up those steep, subterranean steps to the sun.

It was a primary ritual of spring, as essential to our well being as stories and dreams.

In upstate New York, there could still be traces of snow in damp, shadowy places under porches and behind barns, but the unmistakable scent of spring was in the air:  sweet, colored with longer light, tinged with the fragrance of yet unborn lilacs. A scent that awakened us, excited us and made us wild.

We would drag up those blue bikes, dust them off, walk them up to the Dodge dealer at the end of West Main and give the tires bracing shots of air. And then, we were off, out past the muddy cornfields, past the barely budding maples, past the limits of town and winter’s edge. We rode hard and fast with the cold April wind in our ears, mad with joy.

And now, so many years later, I still ride my bike with the girl in me calling the shots. She loves the downhills, sets her heart racing with the uphills, is lost in the glorious moments of green wind and pale sun and lilacs and lilies yet to come. She is a lost girl finally found.

Robin...Twilight

As I sit at my computer in this April twilight, the last of the day’s sun is caught in the wild yellow forsythia bush outside the window. And a robin is splashing in the copper birdbath, completing his evening toilette. The day is winding down, and I want it to linger longer…until at least eight. I’m not a great fan of darkness (though I have friends who love the night and work well into it); for me, darkness is a time of folding into oneself like the purple oxalis that closes its witchy wings and turns inward toward dreams.

Here is a poem about April, titled “The Angel of Pure Joy.”

When you smell spring in the silent stars
and taste the ginger of narcissus, the bite
of newborn chive; when the saffron forsythia
clings to your tongue like fairy dust; when you hear
the sweet voice of your wild bird threaded through still-
bare maples, caught in song; when your big, yellow cat
curves just so behind your knees and the smooth, cool
sheets are spun of fog, rosemary, salt and pine;
when there is no difference between dreams and the night,
then it is that the Angel of Pure Joy speaks your name out loud.

Clothesline in March

One of the most glorious sights to behold on brisk, chilly March mornings when you could drink the air is a clothesline in full use. I have loved clotheslines since I was a girl when my mother taught me how to hang the big white sheets (doubled, of course) and my father’s workshirts (upside down) and the pillowcases (open so the wind could billow through). We hung our little white cotton undies in the middle lines so no one could see.

It was a splendid clothesline at 80 West Main Street with at least six or seven lines stretched far between two large metal T’s. Way out in the back yard, it was flanked by the neighbor’s barn on one side and a gnarled apple tree and flowering quince on the other.

With her infinite practicality, my mother used to put the top sheet on the bottom of each bed and wash the bottom sheet and the pillowcases every week, rain or shine. Even in winter when the sheets froze on the line like great pieces of white cardboard, the clothesline was in use. It’s such a part of my memory–one of those things I rarely think about–unless I am clothesline-less.

When I finally got a clothesline here on Cape Cod after a hiatus of several years, I wondered how I had ever managed without it…without the crisp fragrance of sun and wind caught in sheets, the scratchy towels, the crinkly lace curtains, the jeans that can stand up by themselves. It’s wonderful to thumb my nose at the dryer and its rapacious hunger for electricity. Wonderful to know that all’s right with the world when I look out the back window and see the sheets snapping in the March wind.

I am with clothesline again.

My friend David and I went to Newport a week or so ago to celebrate the first sunny day we’d had in over a week and the decidedly unofficial first day of spring. What a wonder it is to take off your coat and cast it into the back seat! To jam your gloves into the weary coat’s pockets. To feel like you’ve lost a few years, a few pounds, regained something flirtatious, fickle, alive…even if you’re wearing a sweater over a top and a skirt over jeans and walking shoes.

Newport smiled back at us with our cameras and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue (those are a whole other story) but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.

Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.

The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.

Barn in Early March

It is a raw and windy day here with four o’clock snow that isn’t sure if it’s snow or if it’s rain. Still I ventured out for a walk down Main Street past the houses all shuttered and silent, past the old weathered barns, the outbuildings, the side yards with the covered boats, down to the sea that today is the color of gull feathers and buried dreams.

March has entered with a roar.

Wearing a gray wool coat, dark red muffler, sturdy boots, two pairs of gloves, and a wool hat that pulls down over my eyes, I decided to pretend I was in New York and opened a leopard-print umbrella to keep the rain/snow off. (New York women do this all the time: carry umbrellas when it’s snowing out.)

It’s a stretch of the imagination to pretend to be in New York when I’m walking down the quiet street that leads to the water and there is nothing and no one in sight. Only the sound of the gusting wind and the smell of the pewter-gray ocean, only the snow falling in circles into the black puddles, only the crows cawing their late afternoon sojourn to the fading day. I try to picture New York with its bright windows and flashing cabs, its sounds of horns and subways, its wide sidewalks, the lights coming on in the Empire State Building.

It’s a stretch all right.

To tell you the truth, I’m oddly enough happy to be walking in silence, looking out under the leopard-print umbrella at the three colors of lichen on the ancient oaks, at the snow dripping from the delicate tips of the bare spirea hedges, at the dove-gray shingled houses turned inward to ponder their empty state, at the way the wind has shaped the cedars.

Today, the four o’clocks are resting in peace.