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March comes around again riding the winds of
seasons, the changing of the face of the world
yet again.
The temperatures are pleasant, though rain
threatens vaguely. There are green leaves on
the fig tree in the front yard, but of course,
fig trees are notoriously misleading regarding
the arrival of spring. I watch the pecan trees,
much more wary and timid about setting forth
tender new growth.
In March, I watch the season unfold through the
brittle window glass eyes of the house, grown
distorted with horizontal lines in the panes.
The grass in the yard is mostly brown and growing
slowly, though patches of clover sprout like green
mounds of spring here and there. In a few weeks,
white flowers will turn the clover into
pincushion-like celebrations of the nearness of
winter's demise.
As I sit and watch March gather choirs to sing
of spring, I look through those rippling window
panes and marvel that I am seeing the same bayou
bank I explored and grew to love as a boy. A man's
life, measured from birth to where he now stands
amidships, has been written on these same few
acres and that wonderful flow of water beyond.
It was in March that I overhead my father say, for
some reason I still don't know, that he'd just as
soon pack up and move away. He was angry about
something, I still don't know what, and I was
about 10, suffering over what I overheard, not
realizing the emptiness of the threat. I sulked
along Bayou Teche, close to tears, wondering where
we would be, what would become of us, if there would
be water nearby. Perhaps that was what disturbed me
most about dad's unintended and insincere threat to
move us that there would be no water to watch flow
by, coming from unknown headwaters and making way to
undiscovered countries far ahead. I thought he might
take us to Ft. Worth, where much of the family had
fled for jobs and opportunity long ago, escaping the
reservation and all its fruitless, hollow emptiness.
My boyish vision of Ft. Worth was a dry, dusty place
devoid of water. No greater misery could be imagined.
Of course, we didn't move, and I never asked my
father what it was that made him so angry that day.
It was unnecessary. Sometimes in March, when the
air warmed and the rain held itself in restraint,
I'd hop on Nancy, my Shetland pony, or in later
years, my quarter horse Kate, and ride the brown
cane fields around Charenton alone. Mine was a
childhood of solitude, but I was never lonely,
never really longed for friendships because I was
so surrounded by those four old people and their
powerful presence. I wonder, as I look back now on
those March bayouside forays and horseback rides,
if children who grow up in solitude have less
apprehension of the long silences and more fear of
crowds and noise. I know I do not like crowds, I
feel confined and suffocating in them, the nerves
in my skin buzzing with the instinct to get away.
Riding through brown cane fields in March on Kate's
back, crowds and noise and thoughts of escape from
either were completely unknown.
It's not that I was completely friendless in March,
but there was only one that I can recall who was
close. Otherwise, March was solitary and comforting.
No kick the can, no baseball, no sleep overs. In
March, I huddled under blankets late into the night
reading Black Beauty and explored Bayou
Teche days, a few hundred yards of it, anyway, but
there was more there to find than any basketball
court or chalked-in pattern of hopscotch could ever
offer. Armadillo holes were mysterious and dangerous,
for I had read somewhere that the animals carried
leprosy. There was an abandoned water well near the
old camp that Uncle Fred had lived in, and dad warned
me many times to stay away from it, though he had
covered it up, there was still a chance of catastrophe.
A big cypress tree stood in the bayou a dozen yards
from the bank, and rows of thickly growing knees
bridged the two. If I was careful and the water not
too high, I could negotiate across the cypress knees
to the tree, where I had nailed a couple of old boards
to sit on and watch the water move through, coursing
between the knees. Now and then I'd spot small sunfish,
orange-breasted and wide-eyed, chasing minnows. I would
dip tadpoles from tiny pools of isolated water with an
aquarium net, or survey a nest of sparrows in the limbs
above me.
But it is March, and the weather is warming and
the year is unfolding like creation all over again.
In a few weeks it will be time to load the boat and
go to the lake, where I'll feel complete once again.
I have been bound to these wonderful walls for too
long, and much as I love them, need them, I require
the surge of lake water in my veins. Dreams of Lake
Fausse Pointe filter into my sleep like tides; in
waking hours, if I close my eyes, I see its stands
of second-growth cypress, water lapping at their
trunks. Though I pay attention to conversations,
laugh with friends, commune with acquaintances,
there is always lake water behind my thoughts. I
am always aware of it, cognizant of the distance
I stand from it, I know which direction it lies
without thinking about it, and I sense its presence
day and night. It lurks behind my eyelids, floats
in the fluid between the back of my brain and skull.
I must go down to the seas again,
to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way
where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn
from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream
when the long trick's over. (John Masefield)
It's odd that I really mostly think of these
things at the margin of seasons, staring at
March from behind windowpanes that are now so
old and brittle they crack with the changing
temperatures and must be replaced. The windowpanes
have ripples in them horizontally, decades of
settling. If that old house would stand long
enough, and I would live until then, they would
eventually settle into puddles of glass. They
say that in some of the oldest cathedrals of
Europe, the glass must be flipped now and then
to keep it from settling, because glass is not
really solid. It is a very viscous liquid. When
I have the panes replaced, they are crystal clear
and dead flat. I cannot see the world outside in
March as well through their clarity. The distortion
of old windowpanes reveals more. Things on the
peripheral can never be seen dead-on. They must
be viewed askance. Seeing March is best through
old window glass, like sitting on cypress boards
watching sunfish and tadpoles in the water, which
swim away or vanish with the fading dusk, like
childhood, like the safety and surrounding embraces
of the truest hearts in a life. ~ Roger
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