February 2015 was the coldest month in Ithaca’s recorded history. The snow was unending as well. Spring was barely getting started when it snowed during the last week of April.
I plunged into melancholy when the snow stuck to the ground on Earth Day.
I know it has snowed on Mother’s Day more than once.
I know it has rained on Christmas.
Broken tree limbs still hang, tangled, in my maple trees. They were in full leaf when, years ago, it snowed heavily late in April. I was out of town, downstate, at a memorial service for my friend’s husband.
I felt bad because I had not gone to the wedding four years earlier. And now he was dead – complications from smoke inhalation and a compromised liver. A fire on Christmas Day. She was in Omaha, where her mother died of cancer. She was contacted – “There’s been a fire. Your husband, stepdaughter carried out, smoke inhalation.”
A year later, on New Year’s Eve, he died.
Downstate. Earth Day. The service at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Grey and rainy that day, not the sunny service full of resurrection and lilies that she’d wanted.
It was tasteful and moving, human-scaled and subtly scented. Yet mute, reserved, almost bitter – because really, she’d been in her 50s, first time married, spurred on, she told me later, by 9-11. Feeling so alone, not wanting to die alone, finally saying yes to him, the joyous wedding – August, the Long Island Sound at sunset – the photos are still up on Facebook. Taking the plunge, throwing her whole heart into it, and then – the randomness of life, an overloaded extension cord, and in a Youtube video, smoke billows endlessly from the windows.
It is not personal. The leaves came out because it was time. The snow came down because it was cold. The branches broke because the snow was too heavy. The trees did nothing wrong. Their limbs didn’t deserve to be snapped. Nature is simply amoral.
We are the ones who relentlessly decide – good/bad – right/wrong – better/worse – mine/yours. The Buddhists and the Nascar drivers say – It is what it is.
They are just broken maple branches. But on a bad day, caught unawares – snow during the last week in April – an inexplicable car crash – I am suddenly struck by the randomness of events, by nature’s unfeeling ceaselessly-beating heart – and their brokenness can make me very very sad.
And yet… this winter was so brutal that the leaves are weeks behind schedule. There are no leaves catching the late-April snow. No branches will break. See – says one of my Christian friends – there is a god after all.
I close my eyes. I see the jagged-ended, still-dangling branches. I sigh, because February’s chill has not completely left my heart.
The Nascar drivers and the Buddhists and I say again – It is what it is.
cayugaview 