Encounter

I've been thinking about my family's rule that you shouldn't ever mow the grass before Easter, because then where will you hide the eggs? Not mowing before Easter can be a problem in Arkansas, where the rule originated, but not in Ohio.

This time last year, Walker went to his first big scholastic (kid) chess tournament. A year later, last weekend, he returned and took first place.

Hearing the song "Lost in Love" still makes me smell Cafe Vienna and see the blue material of the skirt I was wearing one spring morning, walking across pecan hulls at Hendrix.

It's as if seeing a crocus now gets overlaid with memories of previous springs, previous crocus. Seeing becomes an encounter with the past, like in this poem, Encounter by Czeslaw Milosz:

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Observing anniversaries is a way of producing encounters, of stopping to see how far you've come. Going back through and deleting old emails is another way for me, since I don't do it very often. Sometimes I save the wall calendar where we write all the places we have to be during the year, and look at it a year or so later, before I throw it away--oh! I think. That musical! And I'll be humming songs from it the rest of the day.

Do the sights, smells, or sounds of spring ever result in an encounter for you?