Buds
The period of dormancy for deciduous trees is so short here in Northern California. Leaves turn in November and many still cling to their branches past Christmas. In late January the air filled with the buzz of chainsaws and the shouts of workers high in the trees calling to their fellows on the ground as they do the work of trimming ahead of spring growth. By now, early in February, it’s too late for trimming this year. Every twig hosts blossoms or buds or early leaves. The fields look like they’ve been painted by some mad pointillist with nothing but yellow on her palette. Mustard blooms everywhere, nearly too common to be breathtaking.
Spring, if it can even be called that, is so different here from the real spring in Otsego County, which is still months away. In Pleasant Hill, spring, measured in buds, begins just over a month after the winter solstice. The days have started lengthening, the sunrises moving north on the horizon. Buds are everywhere, but they emerge into a bioscape that was never dormant, where lawns are mowed year round and hedges stay green. Spring is unearned here, not the stunning, incredibly welcome end to months of a landscape buried in snow. The buds are welcome here, but they are not the fulfillment of a promise that sustained creatures through a long hungry season. They’re just buds, just a little more variety in the diet.
People shed their jackets on the canal-side trail. The birds are a little noisier, but most of them have stayed right through the winter, so their songs don’t lift my spirit the way the honks of returning geese did on Sunnyhill. Moving from California to Upstate New York and back has given me a sharper focus on how the seasons affect me. On Sunnyhill the seasons connected me to time, to the journey around the sun with its markers of solstices and equinoxes. In Cooperstown we had time to get tired of onions, of beets and potatoes and the root vegetables that were all that lasted through the winter at the farmers’ market. We had weeks to dream of asparagus.
I am a year older with each birthday, but on Sunnyhill I felt the passage of the year in the cycles of all the life around me. I was a winter older, a spring, summer and fall older. I waited for the first snow and the first geese. I waited for the first daffodils in a way that Californians cannot imagine. Each season had its pleasures and challenges. Time passed. The foods we ate changed. Many of our companions on Sunnyhill came and went. Those who stayed, the three crows especially, shared the waiting with us. It was a special mitzvah to set a pile of fat trimmed from a brisket out on the snow and watch our three crows summon their neighbors for a feast. Amazing how quickly they made off with it. And I could imagine that our crows feathers looked a little sleeker for the next few days.
Since Charlie and I started walking the trail here in the summer we’ve gotten to know a lot of the regulars. An older solo gent stood out from the beginning, perhaps because I saw him nearly every day, perhaps because he is older than me. As with nearly all the walkers we exchanged regular good mornings, and maybe a word about how cold or warm the morning was. His speech was slightly slurred, as if he was recovering from a stroke. His voice was soft and I had to listen carefully to hear him. He walked with a cane, but it seemed like it was more for balance than support. I hadn’t seen him for a few days. Today he was out on the trail with a walker.
The baby in the stroller will be toddling along beside it next spring. This year’s four year old will be in kindergarten next spring, not scootering along ahead of mom. Maybe one of the trim young women running will be pregnant. The buds will come again, the mustard will bloom. I’ll be walking along the canal with Charlie next spring if all goes well, but the following spring I hope we’ll be back in Cooperstown getting tired of beets and waiting for asparagus.