The Grace-Light of Morning

Iris

It's iris time.  Clematis time.  Azalea and columbine time.  Soon--apple blossom petals no longer falling like spring snowflakes--we will be covered with the fine yellow, slightly gritty dust of pine pollen.  If I leave the windows open, it will sift onto my kitchen counter, desk, keyboard; it will cover garden chairs, deck, car.  Next, like floating pillow feathers, cottonwood fluff will wisp about the streets dancing to invisible air currents.  Then locust trees will fill the countryside with white blooms.

Clematis

With all this comes buzz-sawing time as well.  Hammering time.  Lawn-mowing time.  Deep silence, I realize, only occurs when the snow falls.  Bright days bring on the noise!  My husband used to say, "Leave Sundays in peace; mow your lawns another day" ... although he never actually said that to those doing the mowing.

Joe has now come and Bill, Ted, Don, Dan, Bob, Travis, Jamie.  To clean pine needles out of my roof gutter, build new stone steps, re-paint the cement foundation, caulk windows, clean out cellar cobwebs, fix a drainage problem, re-seal the deck, build a small railing.  Next door, there's the high whine of a circular saw from a roof repair crew.  Up the other way, someone has knocked out an interior wall, opened up a dining room, laid a hard-wood floor.  It's true, around here at least:  such work gets squeezed into these (what seem like few) weeks of sunshine and warmth.  The jolly days.

And then, instead of the call of mourning doves and the scraping sound of nuthatches, the insistence of cardinals and crows, we (in this neighborhood) get reverberations from the continuous thunderous thunks and hollow crashes of construction materials.  A new local bridge three years ago.  Now an interstate repair that's in its second year.  As well, pick-up trucks clatter about as they haul mowing machines around town.  Back-up beeps from utility vehicles are heard here, there, everywhere.

The grace-light of morning.  I awake with that phrase in my head--the blessing of clear early light that promises a sweet day.  Each morning I look out, hoping that promise will be realized so that these late spring days will shine, though many fulfill the forecast of "cloudy," "showers," "t-storms."

Or, like a grace note in music, is the grace-light of morning an ornament ... simply that one moment of early quietude soon gone as the day itself strides in and takes over?  The unsullied moment to catch one's breath or write a poem or be as still as a rabbit surveying a garden?