04/10/2026
I was home for Easter. The house I grew up in burned down twenty years ago, so by home I mean the people I find there, and the piece of land, now occupied by a better house. The property’s few acres are mostly wooded, and a creek runs along its southern border.
The stream is one of many that runs into Owasco Lake, one of the smaller Fingerlakes. It is a character from my childhood, the chief source of summer entertainment, whose babbling I heard from my bedroom window, and the first place I ever meditated, though I didn’t have a name for it then.
In recent years, unusually heavy rains have rerouted the water, undercutting trees, and eating away at the bank of our backyard, now diminished to about half the width I remember. Last week it flooded again. The woods were scoured by rushing water, which moved rocks and logs and pulled down trees in its wake. A different personality from the enchanted place where we played as children, catching crayfish and frogs, watching the water gliders, piling stones.
As my parents and I strolled along the washed out bank, checking out storm damage and ogling the spring shoots, we were talking about what will become of us, and the land, in the next five, ten, fifty years. A heavy conversation, mitigated by the spring ephemerals. Black cohosh, wood squill, spring beauties. Trillium and trout lily, no flowers yet. Ramps and wild chives, small, but already pungent. These diminutive harbingers of hope and continuity push up through the leaf litter and along the floodplain. The heart leans heavily on these faithful beings in the face of mortality, war, and climate disruption, and is rewarded. Stalwart and dependable, they are not as delicate as they appear.
Spring and all its flowers
now joyously break their vow of silence.
It is time for celebration, not for lying low;
You too — w**d out those roots of sadness from your heart.
A snippet of Hafez, poet of 14th century Persia (Iran), a civilization recently threatened with extinction.
