Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [35]
Once they’d all gone on, the nest having served its purpose, we considered saving it—but it was too well used a thing, too stained and too shit-in. It made us happy to have been host, for our house to be home, even briefly, to some other life, some welcome and mysterious pulse of energy from the outer world. Where would the new finches go? The bird book said they fed in the wild, individually, in summer, then formed great flocks in fall. I liked to imagine a cloud of them, a storm of gray and rose.
I didn’t think of the house finches again until this new pair showed up in the roses, spring incarnate, pulses of desire and intention. How little they’d weigh, if you could hold one, and how utterly intent they are on their purpose, possessed by their own green and burgeoning industry: to build, to nest, to rear. We further the world, small as we are, little handfuls of feather and heartbeat; we make it go on.
My friend Chris said that after his wife died, in winter, spring was painful to him, all the world but her—and him—renewing itself. I don’t find that spring hurts. I am aware that my interior season is winter, the republic of bare branches, the austere structure at the heart of things. And yet I take pleasure in my garden, even if my heart’s not in it in the way it has been other years. In Vermont I gardened with a vengeance, that fire a part of my own imperative to make a safe home, to surround myself with a place to stand. And raise, unlike the birds, not young, but ourselves. And splendid lilies, monkshood and delphinium, campanula and strawflowers and love-in-a-mist.
When we came to Provincetown, I loved my much smaller garden, a little cottage plot—infinitely more manageable, and small gardens actually are more likely to open onto revelation than large ones; in the intricacy of a contained space the world opens, the way it does in a Cornell box. On the Cape the sea warms the air a bit in winters, and cools in it summers, so that the climate partakes of the marine, of English weather. Thus roses thrive, lavish and luxuriant sprawlers, and if the sandy soil is infertile it also makes for fabulous drainage. I’ve gardened joyfully here.
But this year, no rush to buy seeds, no pushing at the limits imposed by frost or cool wet nights. I am in no hurry, am no jubilant participant, although I am glad for spring to unfold.
And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy so long. At first I felt odd—as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It comes back to me as if from a great distance, this old delight in the world. It’s my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive—and I realize suddenly I can’t remember when I felt it last. It’s a sort of feeling that doesn’t want to be long examined; happy, suddenly, with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves, I just want to breathe in that lightness, after it’s been so long lost.
Something about this new sunlight and warmth begins to dispel something darker and colder in me. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.
So this afternoon I lay on a high hill, a dune at the top (and it seemed the heart) of the world, surrounded