Last Forever

This time of year makes me want to cry out like Goethe's Faust, "Verweile doch!" "Last forever" but this is our augenblick, the blink of an eye. Monday evening I heard the locusts sing for the first time this year.  Every year I think I'll know it, the moment when it becomes real summer.

And every summer I'm caught by the surprise of the locusts with their bugle like announcement that it's well and truly summer. Yes the calendar says summer, depending on how you mark it, either on Memorial Day or the summer solstice of June 21; but to my mind those are the salad days of spring.  Summer begins when the locusts say it begins.  This year that was Monday.

I knew spring was slipping away as the roses faded.  I forget every year that nature pauses before showing her summer colors. She breathes in and out in green foliage, all verde. I feel real grief at spring's passing.  It marks another spring spent of my lifetime allotment of springs.  Did I spend it well? I worry.

"Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough," Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  Perhaps that's what I seek, an innocence easily satisfied, content.  Often I find myself panting after perfection, stuck in a loop of wanting to hold this moment just a little longer and squeeze in the next moment too.

But the rain comes and washes it away, the petals of this moment floating in the street gutter. "What I call innocence," Dillard writes, "is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.  It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration."

Let us go, off to Linda's garden, delightfully weed free, where we can all find a taste of that innocence of spring becoming summer. (We've toured Linda's home several other times you can find those links here and here)

Look at these fuchsia!

These yummy apricot roses are a gift for her daughter.  Linda walked me to the car to make sure I didn't leave with one of these pots!  Even those of us who long for a spiritual perfection sadly are not above pilfering our good friend's roses.

I felt so inspired seeing Linda's beautifully weed-free garden.  Notice how all of her plants have a little breathing space?

Linda's got an eye for detail I admire.  Look at the little iron fence which provides needed support for these phlox.  Linda knows how to combine utility and beauty.

She's a generous friend too. I've got a pot of these hot pink phlox sitting on my patio right this minute, waiting for me to clear a space in one of the gardens for them, a gift from Linda.

Linda is so clever, notice how she mixed fever few in with her annuals to give these window boxes some height.

Here she uses hosta to  fill out a window box. Of course!  Why not use perennials in window boxes?!

Her porch is charming too with it's many colorful pots. I love the little wobbly bench.

I have several wobbly benches of my own.  Prince Charming keeps trying to pitch them out when I'm not looking.  I understand his desire for a well curated and lovely home and garden, something ripped from the pages of a magazine.  But these little wobblies remind me of the flesh and bone, the sinew and wildly open-mouthed wobbly clay vessel I am, always threatening to tip over.

Yesterday morning we had an early morning downpour. Later the sun came out without heating up the morning.  It was a lovely, golden morning for a walk. The leaves of the trees held onto the big fat rain drops unwilling to let go until a gentle breeze nudged the fat water droplets off the edge of the leaves, where the early morning sunlight caught them and lit them so that it looked as though I walked through a gentle and intermittent shower of the softest gold. The moment stretched out, lasting the entire length of the walk. Only reluctantly did I return home.

The trick of living in the moment is to let each come through us and pass.  Like nature we breathe through the moments and then they are gone.  We empty out so we can take the next moment in.  Our attention too short, lasting only 2.3 to 12 seconds research shows, to crowd much in.

Picasso suggested that we give up trying to gain perspective as painters do with trompe-l'oeil and find instead trompe-l'esprit. My good friend, Brenda, expresses trompe-l'espirit by reminding me to live life with fingers wide open instead of grasping after life with closed fists. It's only by opening and letting it pass through our fingers that we capture the moment, a closed fist, closed heart, closed mind, closed eyes capture none of these golden moments raining down on us.

Dillard says, "These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present." Amen.

Happy 4th of July to my sparkling readers!  Let's all go out and live like fireworks, shinning for our brief stunning moment.