Dot and I slept in a bit this morning after I gave up intermittently watching TV and doing taxes with Jan and going to bed at midnight. Jan soldiers on with taxes until who knows when?
Dot and I went for our morning walk at eight and it was the exact same weather as the last five days: light rain low clouds, and chilly. Not much to offer for improving our moods. Though I have to say that just waking up and finding me opening up her crate seems to always make Dot happy, and as long as she can roll in the grass first thing she feels like dancing and doing her doggy yoga: long stretches, forward backward, and lots of hip openers, or wiggles. But as I was looking around for something in our yard this morning that was noticeably different, I turned and saw it: the cherry tree had blossomed. Yesterday I wouldn’t have said it had, and today I can definitely say that this is a by-God blooming cherry tree. It took my breath away.
This morning.
Now, why do I make such a big deal about the cherry tree? First I just like cherry blossoms. So much of the color pallet in southeastern Alaska is grey-green that this flash of pink in a tree is almost like getting kiss. So too the yellow of a skunk cabbage in the muskeg is as if you are walking into a surprise party. Also I have an affinity to the cherry blossom from my love of haiku poetry
Sleeping late—
stuck to the soles of his sandals,
cherry blossoms. Buson
The cherry blossom I believe is associated with a kind of late night sensual love, sometimes illicit in the Japanese tradition. Somehow this makes sense to me in that the cherry blossom comes in early spring and in in a wild and prolific burst…. but the blossoms do not stay long. Then to complicate it even more for me. I associate the cherry flower with both my parents deaths. There were cheery trees on their street in Seattle and they both died in early spring about a year apart. The trees were in full bloom those years so that when cars would park under the trees the blossoms would fall like snow and when people drove away in the morning there would be noticeable blank spaces in the pink mache where the cars had been. This image follows me and reminds me of the time when I started my life without parents.
Also, the last thing about this specific three is that I planted it myself by accident. I have mentioned before here. When building our home, I was splitting wood, and once for lunch I was eating cherries and I put a cherry pitt into a spruce stump. I let the stump sit and the cherry pitt sprouted and finally split the stump and grew into the earth. I think it is the only thing I ever planted that ever really did well here on this rocky wet ground. So today when I turned around this morning to see it’s pink blossoms, my heart was full of so many emotions.
So too the berries green up near the hidden daffodils.
The Cellini Cup which was at the Metropolitan Museum. That is a very large pearl the bird is holding in its beak. My mom said she wanted to eat ice-cream out of it on her hundredth birthday. My teased that he would arrange it. They both died in their eighties.
When I was a teenager in New York City, I would walk the east side of Manhattan, and I would always go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My real purpose was to try and meet girls, I was way to shy. I was hopelessly romantic and immature in my artistic taste. Also a little OCD. I looked at much the same things in the same order every time I went. First the mummies, then the “The Kiss” by the sculpture who did The Thinker…August Rodin.. Then Cilinni’s Cup because it was my mothers favorite thing in the museum, then I went to see the Nude Maja by Goya, and then the Andy Warhol and the spatter paintings by Jackson Pollack because you know, I wanted to be hip. Then one day I was checking out the Renoir paintings. Probably for more nudes when, like this morning I turned around and saw something that took my breath away. It was this:
Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields with Crows. Possibly his last painting. This is not a great reproduction, see others on line.
When I saw my first Van Gogh as a moody teenager I was smitten. It was that same sensation of sudden beauty that I had this morning when I saw that the cherry tree that had been dormant for so long was now in blossom. It had an association with freedom, beauty, eroticism and of course dread. Melancholy joi du vivre. I was stuck with it the rest of my life. It would become my life-long subject matter. But let’s save Van Gogh for another time.
Just so you know, for the three years I haunted the Met. only one time did I speak to a girl. As I remember a very lovely blond young lady came up to me and asked me something. She had a pronounced French accent. I was so nervous I muttered something incomprehensible about the painting we were in front of then I realized she was asking about my old cowboy boots I was wearing,(I lived half the year in eastern Washington and I wore my boots on weekends a lot) she had never seen boots like that and when I was trying to make up some smart crap about the painting she was pointing to my boots. Jesus. It gives me butterflies in my stomach almost fifty-three years later. She was very nice to me and did not seem to judge me harshly and we could probably have sat down and had a nice conversation but no. I fled.
It took me years to get comfortable talking with females other than my sisters. But during those awkward years I got a good art education.
Wet spring morning:
looking at cherry blossoms!
I should kiss you now.
jhs
Here is a recording I made of another part of The Music Of What Happens. This is about swimming with whales. I explain here about my own experience.
