Showers and mercy drops

Very early in the morning, maybe 4:00, it rains, a light rain, or so you think, half-conscious. A little later, around 5:00 or 5:30, it's foggy (an extremely light rain!), and you don't need consciousness or the big window by the bed to tell you so, the foghorn does. The fog moves off slowly, out into the bay, all through the morning, through the reading-in-bed and breakfast and more reading and checking websites and writing, and by 11:00 the clouds are gone, mostly. Whereupon the wind picks up and the sky darkens and a lovely shower, not hard, not soft, just right, falls for 15 minutes. It has turned warmer and the sound of rain through the open door reminds you of childhood, of Sunday afternoons spent with Tom Sawyer or Horatio Hornblower, stretched out on a cot in a porch by the rushing Pere Marquette River. The rain stops, the sun comes out immediately as if summoned to tea, and you close your files and go out into the lushness.

On your walk down to Ash Point, the crab apples are fading from full glory and the lilac bushes, almost as big as trees, are rushing towards it. A crow luks-luks at you, just for fun. A deer trots down the McIntosh's lane, then stops at the edge of the trees and looks back. You are by turns cool and warm, depending on the faithlessness of the breeze. The sky at Ash Point shows the line of showers now racing away from you towards Vinalhaven, and more lines of clouds, a blacker shade of shale, racing at you from the west.

What makes a cloud release its water, or hold it for another place? You choose to sit outside on the deck for lunch, having thought you were safe, a fine judge of clouds, and then you feel a few drops. You look up. There is no cloud above you, but the wind has shifted to the north and the little dark number over there seems to be the cause, in amidst blue sky, and the few drops continue to fall out of the sunshine. You stay, eating a sandwich. Water beads on your apple, making it even more enticing. Drops plink into a glass of Orange Dry, and splatter and widen on your gray T-shirt. Five minutes and a few score drops later the sun dries and warms you again, until the post-rain breeze becomes a strong wind and drives you inside.

You remember the old, weird hymn whose refrain goes

Showers of blessing,
Showers of blessing we need;
Mercy drops 'round us are falling,
But for the showers we plead.

Its idea is simple, the reviving power of rain. The sub-idea is weird, that God holds or withholds the water from the clouds at His whim. Science would give another view, one not quite so dependent on the worth of the rainee. You don't really care at the moment. You've just had a morning of the true kind of faith.

Yellow fingers

Some folks might consider it bizarre that I go dandelion hunting every spring day in Maine. I think it's weird too, actually. No manly salmon fishing or rafting, driveway work or tree chopping: just me and a big screwdriver. My lawn doesn't really aspire to a green, even blanket of suburban perfection. It's mostly weeds anyway. So why this hopeless, uphill battle? Every morning inevitably sees more of the cheery, bright little beasts.

The idea is to get the dandelions out before they have a chance to produce those white-Afro heads of seeds that we as kids used to blow like soap bubbles upwind of any hated neighbors. I choose only the flowering ones (eradicating them all is a nice idea - got a month or two?). For the big spreading ones, I jab the screwdriver next to the roots and with a practiced twist, pull out a handful of those sharp leaves, a flower or two, a couple of buds and sometimes even the taproot which is the whole point of the screwdriver. The little ones I just decapitate without the help of tools, since their little bodies are indistiguishable among all the other weeds anyway. This daily 15 or 20 minutes of work results in a few score trophies and produces a nice, all-green result that actually looks like a lawn. Just don't get close.

So again, why this futile exercise? For the rest of the day I can survey my little kingdom, for we carve out little spaces in the wilderness and a clean lawn is a small bulwark against its terrors. And doesn't the lawn's green sweep look wonderful against the deep blue expanse of the ocean? Never mind that it's all a matter of perspective: the lawn is a terrible jungle to ants.

Deep down, however, I'm afraid that rampant dandelions are an example of moral sloth and turpitude. Dandelions weren't really allowed in the fifties, in my childhood. Neighbors would talk, don't you know. (It's a little startling to see yourself become more like your father, God rest his soul, every year.) Taking a screwdriver to dandelions is like brandishing a Bible against sin, not to put too fine a point on it.

The truth is, of course, that I just like to be outside on these beautiful days, and any little task will do. I'm ecstatic to follow up the painting of my fingers with dandelion juice by more painting: touching up some white paint on the doorjambs, and priming the new garage door in anticipation of a cherry-red extravagant future, and leaving some white paint on my fingers to complement the yellow of the dandelions and remind me of sunshine all evening long.

Hostages

We now have Maine hostas in our backyard in Massachusetts. The other day we returned with a trunkful of transplants, not asking if they wanted to be moved but assuming they needed to be saved from the increasingly domesticated deer. If plants had wishes, I'd guess they would not care to be hacked (literally: with pitchfork, spade and knife) out of their homes even though their fate as deer salad was probable. I thought I heard faint cries of "Anything but Massachusetts!" from the trunk as we drove away from Owls Head.

We tried to be kind. Yes, their taking was brutal, but we did leave some considerable amount of cousins and siblings in place. (Well, that was less kindness than backache; some of the hostas had been there for 20 years, and their rootballs were huge.) I had spent some hours among the roots and rocks to prepare their new soft bed, which sits under a familiar umbrella of pines and hemlocks. We planted them tenderly, fed and watered them immediately, and overnight a lovely rain fell as if ordered for their delectation. They are still small and undeveloped, to be sure, coming from 200 miles nearer to winter. But I have no doubt that in their new effete and citified setting, their strong Maine genes will produce champions and cross-fertilize to enormous effect.

What else could we hijack from Maine to improve the broodstock in Massachusetts? How about some courteous drivers? Friendly customer service? Living within one's means? A working legislature?

See what taking hostages across state lines can get you into?

Civilization

Back in Maine after two weeks away, one in Massachusetts getting civilized again and one in Ohio visiting my mother, although the activities in Euclid included more civilizing culture in a week than I normally get in twenty: a trip to Holden Arboretum, 3,500 (!) acres of preserved woodlands and fields and a lovely crabapple orchard, among other delights (like full-blown lilac bushes even bigger than Maine's monsters); a visit to the Cleveland Botanical Garden, where in the Madagascar Desert installation we spent a tense and satisfying 20 minutes watching a large turtle right itself from an inversion caused undoubtedly by its baleful companion (the way it righted itself was by digging out a pit from the sand underneath itself and then falling into it); and a lovely Sunday afternoon concert by the Cleveland Orchestra, courtesy of my sister-in-law (who markets for the orchestra). Several games of Scrabble continued the taming of the shaggy Maine beast, and the difficulty of connecting to the Internet in my mother's condo-ized building - she will have nothing to do with computers, reducing me to catching brief rides on weak, unsecured signals from kindly neighboring wireless networks named Belkin_G, Motorola, and dlink - added to the general uplifting of character.

But to be back in Maine on a perfect May day makes me want to celebrate shagginess. Mowing the lawn, pulling dandelions, sweeping out the garage - all those mundane tasks are so much more pleasant here, and they involve old clothes and sweat. I wouldn't be welcome in Severance Hall today. I'm even taking easy reconnection to the world of email and webpages in stride, and not let it ruin my day.

Happy Cinqo de Mayo, and may the uncivil lawsuits in civilized Arizona carry on to success.