Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64. Remember singing those lyrics back in 1967? I was 14 then and I thought 64 was really old! Heck, I thought 50 was over the hill.
Those early years, when anxious longing was so much part of my everyday! Where do I belong? What contributions are mine to make? Much much later I read Mary Oliver. Her words, as usual, well placed.
Tell me,
what is it you plan to do
with your one
wild and precious life?
When you are young, you don't know any of that. You latch onto one thing, but pass on something else. I passed on my 7th grade teacher's excitement over Wordsworth. She had us memorize these thrilling lines:
I thought it was a chore. Living then in New York, I could not imagine a field of daffodils.
Now I can.
Notice the sunshine? April doesn't promise endless days of sunshine, but most often on my birthday I get at least a little!
(True, today we also get a snow flurry. Never mind, it was fleeting.)
I am 68 today, happy to be alive, grateful for all the privilege that has put me where I am right now. Grateful for my beloveds, family, friends, Ed. (Over breakfast, with a card which he managed to find on the internet. Lovely.)
I bring in boxes of plants. Arriving now, full speed ahead. Only I have to shelter them in the mudroom because we are to have another freezing night. Just one more!
I am also scheduled to pick up a plant order from the Flower Factory. We drive over, enjoying the landscape that is suddenly perfect. A thousand shades of green. Oh! Want to see what a controlled prairie burn looks like? We pass one on the way.
And from the perennial nursery, we head out to Owen Woods. An FB friend tipped me off: bluebells are in their fullest moment! To repeat: ours, on this side of the ocean, are Mertensia virginica. The flower heads are almost identical to the English bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta). Downward facing bells. True blue. (There are very few true blue flowers out there. You'd think it would be a common floral color. It isn't.) But they are not the same as the English bell.
It seems dreamy and magical to sit in a patch of blue bells and so I do just that.
The Bronte sisters wrote poems about the bluebell, but I like this simple verse better -- it comes from a book of flower fairies (by Cicely Mary Barker) -- one that I think my grandkids would like, not as a school chore, but as a stepping stone to their treasured world of magic and make believe:
My hundred thousand bells of blue,
The splendour of the Spring,
They carpet all the woods anew
With royalty of sapphire hue;
The Primrose is the Queen, ’tis true.
But surely I am King!
Ah yes,
The peerless Woodland King!
We stop at my older girl's home for a birthday drink. And cards and presents. And cake! With candles! And kid hugs.
Candles lit. Ed, take a picture!
And now for something we haven't done in well over a year: on the way home, Ed and I pick up take out food. We go to Taigu Noodles and load up on Chinese boxes of favorites!
Day isn't done until I can visit with Primrose, another spring girl in my life! Her rendition of the happy birthday song is incredible!
And so I get used to that new number: 68.
Past middle age, I did finally come around to Wordsworth and Neruda and especially, in my ancient post 50s life -- to Mary Oliver. What nature loving soul does not also love Mary Oliver?!
("Wild Geese")
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Life. Yes, so beautiful, if you can free yourself of nonsense, often not of your making, to soak in its subtly magnificent moments.
Happy birthday indeed.
