Parts

We got back from Ohio last night while it was still light; the lawn had been freshly mown and everything was wet from late afternoon showers. This morning the dog and I reacclimated ourselves to Keene by doing our usual walkabout the yard, as I’ve described before. Coming home after visiting with family for nearly a week is a welcome sensation, like settling into a pair of old, broken-in shoes: comfort. The house was just as we’d left it, but the yard was greener and lusher: the lilacs bloomed while we were gone, as did the irises and some unnamed white-flowering shrub in the dooryard.

Out behind the house where we rent a first-floor apartment stands a wood storage shed where our landlord stores, I assume, yard tools and other household implements. Behind this shed is an assortment of random stuff: boards, a rusty barrel, a bag of garden mulch, a water-soaked tarpelin. These parts, I’m sure, are merely the pieces of a larger work-in-project, something started then abandoned or something never yet begun. These parts, then, can represent either failed dreams or the hope of a promise yet fulfilled, a dream deferred but not abandoned. Like anything, how you see these parts depends in large part on how you look at them, whether you view the glass as being half empty or half full.

Call me an eternal optimist or merely a slob, but I love this old shed and its sprawling arrangement of stuff, a sentiment I feel as well for our back porch with its motley assortment of castoff kitchen chairs. Although Chris’s Germanic nature would straighten, clean, and tidy-up everything in sight, I have a soft-spot for the random and the ragtag: I prefer the sight of chipped paint on old wood to the pristine perfection of new siding or a pre-fab storage unit newly purchased from the likes of Home Depot.

As I’ve said before in reference to my fondness for old abandoned buildings, I have a strong aesthetic ken for the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, the “beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” Abandoned buildings, old weathered sheds, and cast-off project parts all point to the passage of time; perfectly homogenous houses with “vinyl is final” siding do not. Gradually, those boards out back will return to the earth as will the shed that props them up; so too will the hands that made them as well as the hands that placed them. In winter-time, these parts were covered with snow; today, they lay dappled with damp and shrouded in green, looking entirely different from even a week ago when the yard was browner, colder, and less lush. Viewed from above, as a whole, Keene shows only slowly the passage of time, but when viewed up close, on the level of backyard storage sheds and screened porches, time’s hand comes into sharp focus, its passage and effect looming large amid minutiae.

As I mentioned above, the lilacs bloomed while we were gone this week: their buds had been bursting when we left, and now on our homecoming they are in full flower. Lilac is my mother’s favorite color, lilacs her favorite flower; I remember from childhood a lilac bush that blossomed in the backyard of a house where my parents no longer live, having moved into the house across the alley when I was about eleven. When we were visiting my folks in Columbus this week, I don’t remember whether that lilac bush was blooming, but certainly it must have been: in fact, I can’t even remember seeing that lilac bush even though it surely must still be there in my parents’ old backyard, a yard visible from the rear kitchen window of that house across the alley where they still reside.

In my mind, I remember that blooming lilac bush as being the backdrop of much of my childhood; I remember my mother looking forward to its blooming every year. In my mind, I have a vivid memory of a photo taken beside that lilac bush: after my First Communion, I posed there in a long pink dress with my mother in a long green dress and my father in a shirt and tie. Looking back on that picture now that I’m back in Keene, I am shocked to see that there is no lilac bush in it: in the background instead is the maple tree that grew in the middle of the courtyard between our house and the house next door. The tree that I considered my closest childhood friend, that maple is older and larger today but still flourishing, a new crop of neighbors having put a bench swing under its crowning shade.

In theory at least, it should be possible to date both time and place by the blooming of lilacs and other plants: here in Keene, the lilacs bloomed in mid-May whereas in Walt Whitman’s New York, lilacs were in bloom when President Lincoln was shot in mid-April, 1965. Psychologists say that smell is the most evocative of the five senses: in Whitman’s case, the smell of lilacs always reminded him of Lincoln’s death and the procession of his flower-draped casket across America. In his masterful elegy to Lincoln, Whitman used the image of the flowering, heart-leaved lilac, a western fallen star, and the mournful song of a hermit thrush to represent the tragic loss of a man cut down in the prime of a noble life: a flower-draped casket is the ultimate statement of wabi-sabi, a touch of care that points to life’s impermanence, the way that life continues even though its parts fall prey to time.

Whitman’s New York is several hours south of New Hampshire, as is the Ohio of my childhood: the lilacs in both places will inevitably bloom earlier than those here in Keene. Thus a trip that transgresses latitude will also transcend time: visiting Ohio brings me back to the scenes of my past while submerging me for a time in a natural world several weeks more advanced toward summer than that here at home. Again, these subtle temporal shifts are not visible from a far: they cannot be mapped on any satellite photo or radar scan. But when the parts themselves are viewed apart from the whole, time’s movement across the seasons and across the years is revealed, an unmappable motion that none of our grandest projects or storage sheds can track or ignore.

This is a double-duty blog-entry, serving as my contribution to the Photo Friday weekly challenge, “Parts,” as well as the Ecotone biweekly topic, “Time and Place.”