Green

The very light here has changed in the last week. The bare things which blossomed and delighted me have now leafed and filter the light so that there is a greenness to it all. A shade. A dappling which enchants me.

There is a calmness to it, a serenity, which is lacking in winter and in spring.
Everything looks different, as if one has put on sunglasses, perhaps. And this being the first of it all, everything is sharp and in focus and clear in a way I can't really describe. It is completely different from winter's clearness. It is a polarized clearness, perhaps and everything is, as Paul Simon might say, "Kodachromed."
Yes. That may be it. Polarized and Kodachromed.

I know it affects me and my emotions and my thoughts and my days, this change in the light and I wonder how many of us are affected by nothing more than the light of where we live and what season it is without realizing it at all? I have always thought that people with certain types of mental, well, perhaps we could call them CHALLANGES, feel compelled to move near the beach. Surely there is solace there. The unobstructed light, the light on the water, the vastness of the water itself, the heat (usually), the very obvious rhythm of the waves on the shore, the ozone which is supposedly released as water meets sand. I think when I was younger and dare we say? Crazier? I needed that more than I do now. I know there are still times when I must get back to the beach but not as often as when I was young.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings said that we all know when we arrive at a place which feels like "home" when we get there, even if we have never been there before. That we may have been raised in the mountains but when crossing a desert, realize that there is something...something about it which feels right, which feels familiar, which feels like home and which may be exactly the place where our own soul needs to be for the best health of body and spirit too.

I was miserable the entire year and a half I lived in Denver. Oh yes, it was beautiful. The mountains were majestic and yet, they never caught my soul, they never gave me solace. I felt as if I were living in the wrong time or on the wrong planet or something just wrong. And when I got back to the south, I realized without a doubt that I, quite frankly, need the green of many, many trees and the blue of water. Mountains? Nah. I can live without 'em, thank-you, but I am glad that many people love them and live near and in them. Makes more room here for me and I am sure the people who are mountain people appreciate my need not to be taking up their space.

And I do love the beach. I do love the ocean. I do love rivers. My heart is so happy on a river. So I have to have water somewhere near by but I think above all, I need green.

And here I have it and right now, my entire world is becoming more and more green and it is not a weary, hot, thirsty green. It is a frothy lace of petticoats green. It is a fresh, newborn, brave and succulent green.

It is a cooling green, an all-is-right-with-the-world green. It is a Chinese parasol of green. It is an emerald sparkling on a beautiful dark-skinned woman's ear sort of green.
And I love it.

The final trees to leaf are in full thrust right now. The pecans. Yes, they say. There will be no more frost. There will be no more bitter cold. That is our promise.



And honey, they make good on that promise, the pecans. They are our truth-tellers, the wood we knock on when we want to keep our luck.

And they are leafing now as the cardinals feed their babies at the feeder (even the daddies!), as the last of the wisteria's purple bloom drops into petals on the ground, as the squirrels chase and leap and dance on the tops of fences and on branches and across the ground, as the air filters through all this dizzying green, this woozy-making green, this thousand-shades of green that are the decoration of the walls and the floors and the ceilings of the outdoor room where I mostly live.

The place I call home as does my soul.