April 4, 2019

It is spring, that early spring with its fits and starts of warm and then cool and warm again. The spring that E.E. Cummings wrote about, when the world is “mud luscious and the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee.”

I had the swimming pool opened this past Tuesday, and so now I must walk down the path every day to clean out the skimmers and check the filter pressure level to see if I need to backwash. Today I remove patio furniture covers and move furniture around to its proper spots.

Then I sit for a few minutes and take in the beauty that is here: the arching bare branches of the two willow oaks: the colorful bark of the crepe myrtle; the blossoms of the purple plum and the pink blossoms of the remnants of the almost-dead cherry tree at the end of the pool, and the white blossoms of the pear tree by the house. All of this garden Bill and I created on this once bare hilltop.

And now in the distance I hear the sound of children’s voices. And I am remembering….

When we moved here forty-two years ago from our townhouse onto almost three acres, our two children five and seven were liberated into a new world. They called the overgrown paddock with the vines climbing up the trees “Tarzan and Jungle Land” and they spent many hours exploring there. Later, they had the liberty to go into the public lands behind our house (later a park) and explore with the boys next door.

But that liberty came with a caveat: when I blew three blasts on the Commander whistle left to me by my father from his Army days, they had to come home immediately and call out that they were on their way. They knew and followed the rules.

Now I stand on my hilltop and hear again their voices: “We are coming, we are coming, we are coming.”

And I stand here in the April sunshine, among the trees and the blossoms, and I am blessed by memory.