The tree leaves are there, but they are small and hard to see.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems,
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Warm days have finally returned to Marlborough. I’m talking about several days in a row of temperatures in the high 60s and low 70s. Waldo and I are out on the trail, the skies are blue, there’s only a slight breeze and the ground is dry.
Leaves are popping out everywhere. They’re still tiny and hard to see on the tall mighty oaks, but the maples are now a pale green with small, but recognizable maple leaves. The Japanese knotweed has red and green sprouts, poking six inches and more up from the ground. They’re next to last season’s hollow shafts, now all brown and brittle, ready to take their place. There’s tiny little mugwort leaves mixed in with lesser celandine, green and fuzzy moss, liver wort and garlic mustard. Jewelweed bushes are a pale yellow with nascent foliage and I pass box elder, burning bush, pagoda dogwood, border forsythia, Tatarian honeysuckle, multiflora rosa, black raspberry and Japanese honeysuckle. All have leafy fuzz, not yet fully mature, hanging from their branches. It’s easier to list the plants that are still stick figures than it is to list those that have finally awakened from winter’s deep sleep. The place where I planted the wildflowers now has many sprouts reaching for sunlight, but not yet any flowers.
Waldo is a little nervous, constantly turning and looking behind us. Even though it’s mid-week, well before 5 PM and the end of the workday, there are a lot of people, of all ages, out and about. That, of course, includes bicycles, Waldo’s bane. There are also roller skaters, and people, young and adult, on scooters. We meet and greet many a canine friend and the people they are leading down the trail. Everyone is in a good mood. How could you not be on such a beautiful day. People who have met Waldo before, remark about how he’s not carrying a stick. Don’t they understand how hard it is to hold a stick in your mouth and pant at the same time? For Waldo in his sable birthday suit, it is quite a warm day.
Everyday we pass the new park overlooking Fort Meadow Reservoir. You know, the one where the city’s been pushing dirt around for over a year and a half. I look for evidence of eminent grass seeding. Alas, not yet. They’ve finished leveling off the ground, even put up some fencing and paved a path parallel to the rail trail, but the ground is still brown. If they don’t spray on the seed soon, it’s going to be next spring before they can open it up to the public. I’d say looking for progress here is like watching grass grow, but there is no grass and if there were, it would grow faster.
Someone has planted a couple of flowers in the Covid garden, but other than that, there is little evidence of anyone paying it much attention. I remember, during the lockdown, when the Covid garden first appeared. I was really hopeful that more people would take an interest and make it into a community project. But the lockdown was lifted and people went back about their lives. It’s almost as if people have forgotten about that part of our recent history. There are even crazies out there who claim that Covid was all a hoax. It reminds me of the idiots who think the holocaust wasn’t real. The Covid garden is still popular, though, and I often see people walking about it, enjoying what it has to offer. Maybe now that I’ve planted wildflowers next door, if they abundantly bloom, there will be more interest in the garden.
Somehow, the sign that stands in front of the Marlborough rock garden, the one that says, “Take one, Leave one, Share one,” is now all bent up and rickety. No longer do brightly colored rocks, bearing artistic patterns, rest there in a pile, like easter eggs ready to be collected. It, too, has fallen into disrepair and neglect.
During the lockdown, when it was so dangerous to be in any kind of gathering, people still found a way to act as a caring community. They reached out to the world with love and empathy, artistically sharing their humanity without thought of recompense. I think that spirit is still there and always has been. It’s just that everyday life now puts demands on our time and energy that saps what we have available to share our love of life with those we pass by.
I just hope it doesn’t take another lockdown to bring it back to the surface.
Fort Meadow Reservoir is a beige shadow of what it will be in a few weeks.