So you know how a few weeks ago I wrote, among other things, about how one of the hardest things about living in New England for me has been the wall of reticence, the obvious, cultivated reluctance that strangers have for engaging with each other here? Well, I don't know what happened, but ever since I wrote that, it's like almost everyone in my neighborhood, or even walking through my neighborhood, read it and decided to change. Maybe it's the fruit of my own personal rededication to friendliness; you know, you give a little, you get a little, and maybe I've been giving more just because I've been thinking about it more. Maybe everyone who lives in a three-block radius of this house has taken to reading my blog, and maybe they all got inspired or shamed or just startled into snapping out of their own personal head-down-against-the-chill track. Maybe I'm delusional. All I know is that since I wrote that piece, almost everyone I've met has had a smile for me.
Of course, I have also had a smile for everyone, and of course this matters not to the iron-faced man who used to shop in my store and lives in that strange house around the bend. A week ago Wednesday, before my crippling, left-sided mittelschmerz kicked in with a vengeance or the snow returned with an icy wet laugh, I was out taking photographs in that brief week of warm springlike weather, photographs of things like skeleton trees just about to awaken. As we passed each other, the iron-faced man looked at me like I was assaulting him when I smiled and waved and said, "Hi! Isn't this a great, great day?" He passed me silently, never taking his narrowed eyes from my smile, never cracking his mask.
But to make up for that, this week the young cashier getting over a terrible headcold laughed with me at my own hubris as I kept dropping things and tripping all over myself, being in too much of a hurry to get outside with my camera. Also a teenage girl -- a teenage girl! -- spontaneously greeted me cheerfully as I was bloatedly shoving myself through my own front gate, smiled, asked how I was, agreed about the beauty of the singingly cold and windy day, and then went smilingly -- smilingly! -- on her way. A teenage girl! In New England! On a cold day! Now, granted, this girl is extraordinary. She lives in a lovely little house with a lovely family, including a sister and a grey-haired gentleman who could be either a father or a grandfather, a poofy, high-strung dog with a gleaming coat, and lovely cats who follow her and anyone else in the family who dares to leave home even for ice cream as far as my gate, where they then sit in the street and cry until one or all of their humans return. Still, she is shy, and when I see her, I'm usually the one who says "hi" and smiles first. Yet she, too, felt enough joy in this past week to be the one who initiated a conversation with me. She, too, glowed for at least half a block, as far as my eyes could follow her before trees interfered, with friendliness.
Ah, it feels like spring, even though the warm weather got washed away and my daffodils -- remember them? -- are back under a thick pile of white. It feels like spring in the heart. It feels like spring in the heart of the people, not just me.
I got my first shot of spring when I went to the DeCordova again, on yet another perfect Tuesday. I saw (but was unable to clearly photograph) my first robins of the year, enjoying the wriggling fruits of the hillside mud.
I got my second shot the next day, walking around my neighborhood. I walked over the bridge that is being renovated.
I looked at the glass-like river water flowing underneath, water that only a week or so before had been opaque with white ice. Only a week or so before, the broad, topaz river of summer had contracted down to a flat, white passage for only the lightest travelers. I remember at the time thinking about how I would explain that, how I wished I'd grabbed my camera as I rushed out of the house trying to get my Netflixes in the post before the last pick-up but then spontaneously deciding to stroll out to the bridge. I thought about love, loving the moment you are in.
I loved the moment I was in when I saw that the ice had receded, too, and this time I had my camera. (Click to enlarge.)
On the way to the bridge, there is a house with lace curtains that I first noticed on a snowy day. I had been out on another after-lunch shooting ramble, but by the time I reached this house, almost all the way back to my own, I was tired, too tired to photograph the way the house looked with the lace and the snow like a richly embellished wedding cake of toothaching sweetness. I told myself I would take that picture another time, but you know what? It has never happened. There has not been one day with the same light and the same conditions.
Days don't repeat. Moments don't repeat. Light returns, but never the same way twice. (Click to enlarge)
This is not to say that we should all take our cameras with us wherever we go, or that moments die if we don't record them. They don't; after all, like a lot of beautiful things I've seen, I didn't photograph this one moment, but I still remember that day, that pink sky, the way that specific charming little house looked all frosted with real ice and trimmed with lace behind glass, and how my day had led me to stand there and look at it. This is to say, camera or no, this day, this vision, this record, whatever record you make, on paper, on pixel, on protein in your skull, on empty air forgotten as soon as it is exhaled, this opportunity is here for you to love right now and right now only. The people you pass, even if they are grimly visaged and seem determined to stay that way, you don't know the truth of their lives. You don't know but that maybe one smile and one remark reveling in the fact that you both breathe, right now, today, could be the only thing that will intersect with any of their moments this week and make them smile.
You do have the right to risk this, to risk being a loving influence. You may never know when you've accomplished it, and the only thing you personally get out of it may be the way you enhance your own love for this moment.
But, oh, on a fiercely painful day earlier this week, a man let me interrupt his brisk walk to pet his soft little golden retriever into abject wiggliness, and for that moment, I was not in pain. Later that day that teenage girl from up the street smiled and said "hi" to me first, for the first time ever, even though I've seen and spoken to her and her family occasionally for nearly two years, and my pain stopped for that moment, too, just for the span of a few breaths, but more than it would have if she hadn't. And neither of them knows that either of them gave me love, maybe not love from themselves necessarily, but love from my heart for two moments of my own life I otherwise would have let slip into oblivion because, pain-washed like that, they wouldn't have been among the better ones. (Click to enlarge.)
And I don't know if this makes sense to anyone but me, but I'm going to remember those moments, even without photographs, as I remember the ice-narrowed river, as I remember the lace-curtained house in the gently glowing snow.
Happy Love Thursday, everyone. That's all I've got to say for today, at least in words.
(Click to enlarge.)
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