In Warm Rain

Forgive me as I write about Spring....at least a whiff of Spring. This was from last night.

The world smelled of warm rain, a delicious smell indeed.  One of those smells as important as Grandma’s Cookies. I felt that flutter of spring, the rising of that beautiful thing which is human hope. I was the bike-riding version of a fawn prancing among crocuses.  Only in the dark. And the rain. Coming back across town from the organ church. It was that affirming feeling, maybe there were still piles of filthy snow, maybe the reminder of the weekend’s weather was grimly gruesome. But it was that affirmation that you could remember this feeling, what spring was. Feeling the feeling of the feeling, if not the feeling itself. Like feeling how it felt to be in love, remembering what that felt like, even if you weren’t actually in it. But faith that it—spring, love, whatever—will happen.

This feeling made me want to DO THINGS: bake cookies, host parties, go hiking, ride my bicycle many miles, have guests, go dancing, eat more Thai peanut sauce, adopt a cat. 

And I felt happiness to be in Ithaca….not just resigned or tolerant, but actively happy. Maybe because I was on a bicycle. (You can keep your little hardy northern mouth shut, Sylvia Klassen, but I was too blasted by this terrible winter to ride my bicycle.) And being on a bicycle again, finally, was as delicious as that smell of warm rain.

Today I took the scenic way home from Cornell, curving around the roads in the Plantations, sitting tall and looking delighted and gazing off into the trees. I became duly muddy after some off-roading activities thanks to a slightly disorienting turn, which seemed appropriately fitting.

Spring makes me stupid with glee. I end up grinning at passersby and bum-bumming to myself. Add to this the bliss of relieving release from the world’s tallest basement (my office building), and the extended frisson of flying down THE HILL on bicycle (not just a single hill, either, but it comes in stages, so you have moments of being present before the next ripping descent) at the end of a productive workday and I could quite possibly become airborne by the time I’ve reached downtown.

I reached downtown Wednesday and bought myself a charming little epiphyte tillandsia plant to keep me company in the kitchen.

Otherwise, it’s The Fish And I, living in this Mansard Roof.

I was wearing as many clashing versions of teal and green as my wardrobe would allow (disregarding the neon pants): teal sweater, neon green vest, blue-teal scarf, my sister’s every-color-teal-blue hat. Two clashing colors is unaware; more is intentional. It felt playful and good.

So I came into my apartment after playing that beautiful tracker instrument, just now, remembering with fondness how my organ music was sitting primly in boxes, all organized. Even though some of it was being deployed and was in circulation, left by the organ at the church, not in my prim boxes. 

Then I made a metaphor joke in my head, so nerdy, yet so applicable to my personal circumstances….remembering from Soil Fertility class how soil organic matter has an active fraction and a passive fraction (i.e., not biologically active, aka humus) and how my pipe organ matter was likewise. The books that actively transferred between apartment and church, de-composing (oh dear) and then the books that were not available to soil organisms for consumption.