Splendor in the grass

Each year in springtime, the fireflies return to my garden. It’s what the essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson called “the resurrection of the ordinary.” Not the resurrection of human beings, but of the earth.

If fireflies only appeared every 100 years, would people rush out to see them like millions of people did two years ago to observe the total solar eclipse? Yet now, when the fireflies surround us, so few of us notice.

In the Black Mountains of North Carolina one summer night, I looked over a meadow at dusk to see the grass suffused with fireflies. It was as if the stars had fallen to earth. And above the French Broad River nearby, I saw a landfill lit by fireflies: millions of tiny luminous things in the place you’d least expect, floating above buried dishes, eyeglasses, Pampers, and plastic bags, mirroring the stars.

The poet Fred Chappell wrote, “The pleasure garden is a place apart, where the savors of the season are augmented, where the soul is invited to invite itself.”

What better place to observe a small resurrection blinking in the night?

Native Places Site

Greeneville, Tennessee

I went to Greeneville, Tennessee, to visit two dear friends who were aging fast. Their columned house was once resplendent with a long swimming pool lit by lanterns. Now the lamps are broken and the pool is full of slime. Yet, despite their own frailness, my friends still help a neighbor go to church every Sunday.

Not far from their house, I noticed a little church clinging to the hillside by its fingertips. Its cross was leaning and its columns were bent, but the sight of it gave me comfort.

I thought of the elemental need for consolation in the face of life’s uncertainty, and how simple temples, shrines, and chapels like this one can be found all over the world. “The chapels are as eloquent about deep-seated human fears,” wrote nature author and essayist Barry Lopez,” as they are about deep-seated faith.”

When I said goodbye to my friends, they gave me cuttings of my aunt’s favorite climbing rose.

Then they shared the latest gossip about their neighbor who was arrested while rolling naked in a public mulch pile. He told the police, “I was instructed to do so by God.”

There’s nothing like living in the moment.

[et_pb_section bb_built="1"][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text]

Source

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_gallery _builder_version="3.17.6" gallery_ids="4699,4700,4701,4702,4703" posts_number="5" fullwidth="on" zoom_icon_color="#4b4b4b" hover_overlay_color="rgba(255,255,255,0.9)" /][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

Cozumel

From the airplane window, I glimpsed a small airport terminal in Cozumel, Quintana Roo, Mexico. It was painted in bright colors. The jacaranda trees were blooming and a mother was selling tortillas in the open breezeway.

I wanted to get off the plane and start my life over.

How is it that a small detail can change the way we live? What does a painted airport tell us about a country, and even about ourselves?

In Mexico everything matters, my wife Judy said. “The stones in the street, the fruit placed on a market stand, the geometric pattern on the dress of a tortilla seller. It’s all esthetic.”

Moreover, this esthetic wasted little and honored much. After seeing toy animals made of soda cans, egg shells turned into flowers, and an ordinary philodendron growing on a wall in a reused jar, I slowly realized that the extraordinary could be made from the ordinary.

When I looked out of that airplane window 30 years ago, our children were in school and Judy was becoming a landscape architect. We wouldn’t get off.

But later, we would build a pink stucco house in a walled flower garden in North Carolina. Philodendron included.