Where the Light Falls

I awake at my usual early hour to find the sky still dark.  Sunrise is yet an hour away. The clocks have all been turned ahead to save light in anticipation of spring’s arrival. The March lion that roared with bluster just weeks ago has morphed into a gamboling lamb, eager to nibble on the sweet, green grass emerging following recent rains.  You can almost hear the garden growing.  Spring is happening that fast.

When temperatures reached the 60s accompanied by several days of intermittent rains, the landscape began to green before our eyes.  Gardens, lawns, glades and meadows were well fed, and the land’s internal clock began to spring forward. Run-off from the rains made their course underground into creeks, ravines, and ditches.  The natural slope of our meadow guided the rainwater to a narrow drainage channel between the shade garden and our south woods. 

Often in March, we grab a steel-tined rake evacuating any clumps of soggy, fallen leaves that might clog sections of the 300-foot length drainage channel, hindering the flow of rushing water to a large culvert under the road at the end of our gravel driveway.  Fortunately, even with last week’s rain events related to historic snowfall in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska, water is moving unimpeded through the culvert to the boomerang-shaped creek that gives its name to our five-acre property in the country.

Invigorated by the exercise and the brisk air, it is the perfect time to gather up any tree branches and twigs snapped off by the weight of late February snowfalls and heavy winds.  Positioning myself like a horse pulling a load, I muscled a few branches that exceeded my height to a distant corner of the meadow along our northern woods.  After having dealt with two coronavirus vaccinations and months of wearing a mask, I felt back in the world of the living at long last.  Kit used a handsaw to cut up the largest of the fallen branches and hauled them to the woodpile.

Signs of seasonal change are emerging everywhere.  Spring peepers are peeping. Cheerful choruses of birdsong fill the air. Jonquils, hyacinths and hellebore Lenten roses have pushed up above last year’s brown cover of decaying hosta leaves.   With the slightest encouragement, buds stand ready to burst forth in flower signaling spring’s arrival on the March calendar.  Already the urge to garden is in the air.  Stores are filled with assorted bulbs and seed packets. This time of the year, I would normally have 50 strawberry plants ready for planting in our raised strawberry bed. When that is done, I’d spread a layer of fresh straw to retain moisture during the growing season.

Evenings past we would sit on the screened porch with our cats, mesmerized by the sound of water rushing by in the creek below. But they are now all gone, as we will be soon.  Nostalgically, I find myself wishing for peaceful hours filled with reading. Instead, my hours are filled with packing moving boxes and saying goodbye to the gardens and memories we have collected over the past 15 years at Boomerang Creek.

While packing up books from my library and letting others go to friends and Joe Chevalier at Yellow Dog Bookshop, I pulled “Where the Light Falls” – a novel by Katherine Keenum—from one of my bookcases. 

Set in the 1870s amid the bohemian neighborhoods and teaching studios of Belle Époque Paris, the novel is awash in light and color. Jeanette Palmer, a young American woman studying art in the City of Light, takes a walk along a boulevard in Paris and takes note of “where the light falls and where the shadows lie.”

Jeanette walked past flower vendors with pushcarts loaded with buckets of roses and bronze chrysanthemums, while across the street lavender shadows played against mellow stone.  A few blocks away, the harsh white glare of the electric light…would soon come to bleach and harden everything in sight.

Rereading that passage, I recalled the harsh white glare of February. Winter’s stark white glaze blurred the line between sky and earth that a month later has been softened by rain and increasingly warmer breezes. Spring has officially arrived on the calendar.  Spirits are once again high.  Hope is in the air.  And where the light falls, the world is once again filled with the promise of spring.