arrivals and departures

I.
In the days before I left New York, a false sense of spring settled over the city.  On New Year's Day, I woke to the sound of birdsong outside my window.  I had not yet remembered where I was, or when it was, or what had happened, or what I expected would happen, and I thought, blearily: It's spring.  It's April, the month of my birth, when spring is something I've been waiting for so long I'd forgotten how it was to have it.  And then I woke up, little by little, and I realized that I was still in the season of the cold, the bleak, the ongoing, the ended.  Eventually I considered that, perhaps, it was a sort of spring, this first day of a new year - but not in any sense that I'd recognize as a gardener.

The city seemed determined to prove me wrong.  First there were those bulbs laid out on West 10th, followed by the acrid, peaty smell of mulch that fills up your nose like wine in a goblet.  Across the park, crews of workers lazily raked around dormant perennials.  The park's precocious squirrels looked on, confused.  Me, too: was it spring already?

Still I was suspicious, remembering the cruel nursery rhyme I'd read as a child ("Wake up," whispered Winter, / pretending to be Spring, / "Don't you want to be the first to hear the robins sing?" /  So up popped a little crocus / from its bed of warmth, / just in time to see that joker / laughing up a storm).   Yet by Wednesday afternoon, even my cynical heart was won over.  On the south side of Silver Towers, one of those slender, inexperienced young cherry blossom trees shyly offered me pink petals.  Go easy on this one, winter, I thought.  - Reward its optimism with a few days of spring.  And I enjoyed the sight for what it was, right then, regardless of what comes.

II.
The flight tracker portrayed our plane, four times the size of nearby Newquay and Quimper, bravely flying above the cyan sea.  Sometimes additional information appeared on the screen, informing us of what lay below, what we could see if we collectively decided to change course and land.  Other times, the blue itself was labeled: now we passed over the Porcupine Bank, its edges speckled with sapphire to indicate depth - though how this watery location could possibly bear the name of such a prickly landlubber was not indicated.  I imagined seas full of bobbing animals, patiently drifting from one coast to another, looking like the spiny fruit spilled by the sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua), which claws on to grass and clasps onto fur and shocks the bare feet of the unwary.

More morbid information appeared as benign little dots on our map: Bismarck, 1941 (quite far out in the lonely blue depths); Colossus, 1798 (off the coast of Cornwall); Egypt, 1922 (northwest of Brittany).  We were being shown a map of shipwrecks, I realized, of terrors from an earlier age of the travel and transport of human beings - as though our own travel was not precarious, as though falling from the sky would not be the worst way of falling overboard.