We'll Have Plenty of Time Together

We'll Have Plenty of Time Together

I didn't go to church today,
I trust Mother Divine will understand. 
The sun was shining in a cloudless sky
on daffodil shoots the height of my hand.
She knows, She knows how brief my play,
how short this spell of soft spring weather.
She knows when I am gone from here
we'll have plenty of time together.

After "I Didn't Go to Church Today" by Ogden Nash

I Didn't Go to Church Today

by Ogden Nash

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.

From The Best of Ogden Nash (c) 2007 Ivan R. Dee

          Ogden, I didn't go to church today either. No swirling surf in Iowa, but after the long winter, the daffodils are daringly poking green shoots up through last year's decaying leaf litter and the sun is perfectly warm for a long walk in the woods. 

          Ever since our 17-year-old kitty Pepper died, I have been having unexpected episodes of feeling my mortality, like a sudden electric jolt that stops me in mid-step. It's not the end of the body that shocks me into a momentary panic so much as the piercing knowledge that the sense of self that lives in my mind will all too soon be gone forever. 
          This existential angst is an old, familiar feeling that commenced at age 13. It felt like I was falling into a black hole, to be extinguished, eradicated, annihilated, forever and ever, even though the rest of the world might go on without end. I was utterly terrorized by the thought that "I" am just a brief blip in time, and nothing I heard in church about the immortality of the soul consoled me for the eternal loss of this particular mortal self. 
          Now, as the years advance and the moment of termination approaches, I do have more of a belief in the soul, but it seems like a sort of hazy cloud, a ubiquitous field without much distinct personality, at least not this personality, which will never ever be replicated. 
          Because I have such a keen sense of my time being limited, I feel an urgency to experience as much as I possibly can of this amazing world with this unique mind-body. So I spend as much time as possible in nature, adoring her ephemeral creation in a seemingly endless cycle of recycling into ever-new variations of old material.
          Perhaps when the body stops, this life will just seem like a dimly remembered dream, slipping away without any great sense of loss as the higher self entertains entrancing new possibilities. 
          Pepper, you whose body is now nourishing the roots of a Sassafras tree, how is it?

after the rainstorm

after the rainstorm

daffodils bend to the ground

faces splattered with soil

Not just April showers but a heavy rainstorm yesterday, bending the daffodils to the ground and splattering their yellow faces with soil. More heavy clouds today and a cold wind pushing the temperatures down as well, expected to hit freezing tonight. So this afternoon I cut 108 daffodils to save them from the hard frost. A stream of clear gelatinous sap ran from each hollow stem, which I immediately plunged into a vase. When I brought them inside and placed them on the dining table, their bright faces lifted as if the warm sun had come out. By the time light and warmth reappear, these daffodils will return to the earth as compost for their own bulbs and the microorganisms that feed them in turn.

dead leaf giving way

dead leaf giving way

to eager green leaves thrusting

upward to the light

Way too hot for early April. It feels like we've gone from winter to summer overnight. The daffodils are exploding in bursts of yellow and white against the dull brown remains of last year's litter. You can almost hear the spears of leaf and bud thrusting up, piercing dirt, dead leaves and even corrugated cardboard. How powerful and persistent is the force of sap!

hidden behind

hidden behind

the daffodil's yellow trumpet,

a crab spider lurking

When I left for the Yucatan at 3:30 am in early March, the thermometer read 15 F (-9 C) and the frozen landscape consisted of dead brown grass and bare branches. When I returned ten days later, it was 86 F (30 C), hotter than the tropics, with green shoots of grass and early spring flowers all abloom.
          Today I sit under a pin oak beside a coterie of daffodils to take a portrait. With ruffled yellow trumpets held above the six pointed petals that form the perianth, they look like Renaissance ladies with golden crowns and white ruffs. I choose one and bring the camera as close as I can to capture the graceful shapes emerging from the daffodil's yellow corona: the three semi-circular lobes of the stigma at the end of the style and the pollen-encrusted anthers.
          That's when I notice a small black bug crawling up one of the columnar filaments. The next instant, a brown crab spider, lying in ambush, darts out from behind the corona, brandishing its long forelegs as if to say, "That's MY bug, back off!" We play a little game of hide and seek as I try to get a close-up of the spider. Meanwhile, the little black bug wanders off along the ruffled edge of the daffodil's corona. Just as quickly as it appeared, the spider dives out of sight. Game over, back to business.