The Traveling Time Machine

I have been in Maine a week, waiting the arrival of grandchild #3, and although at times it feels like a scene from “Waiting for Godot”, (Beckett’s existential play where two people wait on stage for someone that never comes), it has been grand to watch spring replay itself here.  Here in northern Maine, at the end of May, the lilacs are in full, glorious, sweet- smelling bloom.  The black cherries are just putting out there white wands of flowers and the crab apple trees have left carpets of pink on the sidewalks after the rain.

 Nesting is in progress with a robin choosing an easy-to-spot nesting site in a lilac tree by the garage.  She “perp, perp, perped” at my grandson and I as we happened by, giving her location away, and now we have a way to keep track of her progress.  No yammering fledglings yet so we must still be in incubation mode.  Rather like my daughter now that I think of it, still in incubation mode.

But when I left Texas it was, of course, summer; it is almost always summer in Texas.  The   wildflowers weren’t entirely gone though and the first day of travel had the road lined with the reds, yellows, and orange of Indian blanket and coreopsis which gave way in Eastern Texas to the all white of the largest Queen Anne’s Laces I have ever seen. Everything’s bigger in Texas.  And here I thought the Queen was absent from the TX scene, but not here in the panhandle; here she rules the highways, not in August as I am used to, but in May.

Arkansas had its hedgerows covered in honeysuckle, which made me keep the windows rolled down and made the whole world smell like July to this New Englander.

  But still it was mid- May.  And who knew they grew rice in Arkansas?  Perhaps everyone but me.  Fields full of twisting dirt mounds with sluiceways cut through them; it looked like something you would see on the side of a U-Haul.  “See the mysterious snake mounds of Arkansas”.  Rice fields, or paddies not yet planted and, had the highway not been backed up for about 5 miles with some unknown traffic problem, I probably wouldn’t have gotten off and seen them. Definitely, this is the plus side of traffic.  Often the “real state” is just a few miles away from the uniform state you see from an Interstate.

Tennessee was more than the “greenest state in the land of the free”.  Both the Black Locust and the Black Cherry were in bloom with their hanging white clusters of flowers so the roadsides were a blend of white and green.   Plus that purple Paulownia was in bloom, a tree from China, an escapee from suburban yards looking for color and a fast growing shade tree. 

  In Virginia, it was time to roll down the windows again for the Russian Olive perfumed the air.   Another invasive that surely has taken over the roadsides but the least they can do is bring something to the table, and the Russian Olive brings spring perfume. 

I interrupted all seasons to be back in “Little Italy” in Baltimore with my daughter.  The aromas of Italian kitchens mark each season here.  Ah, to wake up to garlic and sauces and baking bread as the restaurants gear up each morning, gets you out of bed and thinking of things grander than cereal to eat.  And yeah, the twitter of chimney swifts has returned to this enclave completing the image of a poor mans trip to Rome.

But at the moment, I am hearing the twitter, not of birds but of a grandson already present and wanting to get up.  I know this chronicling of what was blooming where, isn’t edge of your seat stuff, but so often the point of my writing is just to get it down as my own memory, for memory is already getting to be a fleeting thing.  Bear with me then, personal chronicles will continue for awhile.