THE RITE OF RENEWAL

By Tom Sheehan

Spring, in its modest and tepid glory, is somewhat like a house painter trying to paint a shadow; he only gets it done when the sun tells him so. Spring is a wait, not an event; a patience and not a sudden intrusion; a tolerance and not a revolution; in fact, on some days, it is a secret let out at recess, away from the books, the lessons, the crowd.

Often, spring is a solitary watch for the one waiting on it. Believe me.

For me, it is not a demand for flowers to leap from my flower beds, be they crocuses or tulips or daffodils the winter took to hand after the prior October. It is not the sudden appearance of an early rose on the two vines, each one between the two front windows of this old house I continually tell stories about, still standing since 1742 despite my lack of maintenance expertise. Oh, my, back then they built barns, and similar-structured houses, to last for millenniums. The proof’s here.

For me, spring is that wait for the true form of the maple tree in the backyard, the double-trunked beauty where in its broad V I laid a set of tire chains years ago. Now only a single link of my youth shows itself in the fork of that tree. I can tie my life to that exposed link. The maple, in truth, was here before I came. But later two others maples, in past springs, were dug from the nearby swamp and replanted along the driveway, between this old colonial and a neighbor’s house barely forty years old. Their roots gripped, grasped Mother Earth. So high did they leap, these young maples, so quickly slammed age rings into their bowels, they began to reach out and caress the neighbor’s house. In my perversity I thought it a caress; they, good neighbors, most likely thought it invasive, especially on windy nights. With precaution and good advice, I vowed to have the two maples cut down. I had long passed on my fully reliable Jonsered chainsaw, which I used for over twenty years in fighting the price of oil, so I asked for an estimate from a local tree man. He, in basic honesty, gave me a very good price, and just before he was to start work, his face as wrinkled as bark of a tyrant oak, his eyes still settled with a piece of summer sky, asked, “Kids ever have any tree houses up there?” He nodded upwards, a sly smile on his face, as if the answer might force a price change.

I said, “No, but don’t ask about the double-trunk maple tree out back. That one’s had terraced houses, on each side, built by a couple of generations of kids that I know quite well. They have been furnished with rugs, furniture, and housed, obviously, the ultimate secrets. And I know there are spikes there, many of them, driven feverishly and with skill. Some of the limbs may be ferric mines, and probably most of the ways up.” (In fact, one of those tree house builders is now supervising the construction of a new and rather large house belonging to an NFL owner). Then I told him about the tire chains.

“I wouldn’t want to take that baby down,” he said, nodding, the smile gone, but appreciation in his face. “Will you tell the guy who eventually takes it down?” I told him. “Yes, but its purpose in life is to outlast me, revenge I suppose for the insertion of the tire chains.”

But, I’ll tell you outright, when that old master of a maple forms itself fully, broadens and deepens its limbs with the weight of leaves, with the density of leaves, when the southwest wind finally moans through those leaves on a certain night not far from my head, it is the night I will sit on my front steps in darkness and glory in the realization that the flowers are not far away, are chasing me; it is the night that old poems come across my mind that were composed here many years ago (one repeated often in adolescence dreams that said, “Lover, not yet lover, take my hand, gentle it, soften it, curve it with your night arch tremulously, give me your garlands, bend the sky to me and moon, I can only reach at touch of you”).

It is the night I can nearly hear the tulips or crocuses break ground, hear a single rose burst its radiance, the night a walking neighbor sees me at the last moment in the darkness and says, “I’m thinking the same thing, Tom,” and walks right on past, he too celebrating a becoming.

Spring doesn’t happen for me; it becomes, it absorbs, it celebrates at first in total silence, the kind a good listener can hear across the skin of his cheek, the brow of his head, the back of his hand. I am lucky in such bodily attributes, and some of those becomings are notched at the back of my mind. One night, west wind at whispers, moon playing hide and seek over the rim of Vinegar Hill, mosquitoes bravely coming forth, a single moth struggling in its early universe, a skunk, tail up, passed at my feet, and passed on into further darkness. I held my breath for more than one full minute, froze myself in the pure darkness.

On some of those newly west wind nights, though, the silence falls apart. There is a sudden whir of wings, shadows are thrown from moon glow flights of birds in migration, late comers, early risers, heading north , and they bring back the old poems—spring births both new and old poems, like the renewal that spring is. It is a mouth, this dawning spring, a gaping promise, the open doors of a strange barn once before visited—at least once, and remembered. It is the day that bees throb their thick aching against a sheet metal sun and draw out survival like an ingot from the forge. All my maple trees wear new brash green helmets the springsmith has hammered out of winter. One of those trees, stripped by ants, finds itself numbed into its roots by recollection and leans into history. For the first time in the wholly spring night, at least for my listening, the geese, sprung from a southern bow, are heading home to Ottowas, Crees, Blackfeet, marshes and reed grasses still frozen in the backyard of the earth, are silent, highly silent, the way a hammer rests between strikes, perhaps arched as the silent horseshoe at its apex coming to be a noisy ringer.

Noise, I might say at length, is all part of it, this becoming, this spring.

Listen! Hear it! Feel it! Touch it! Run with it! It only comes once a year!  

 

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