& so we meet on this terrain

i.
I once had a professor - well, by now I have had many professors, and many professors who made an intellectual or emotional impression upon me - but then there was one particular professor, who taught me both Henry James and The Godfather.  "There is no evidence that Henry James ever had sex with anyone," I remember him proclaiming rather grandly: and as we all know, I love people who make grand, superficially irrational proclamations.  Another such proclamation was sparked by Marquez's character Fermina, which led my professor to speculate on the numbers of weekends he had left with his wife.  (You will forgive me for my vagueness: I have not read the book since.)  I'm afraid, at nineteen, that I rather missed the point: what more impressed me, at the time, was the idea that a professor would dare discuss his sex life with his students!  In any case, this idea has remained with me: that we have a set number of sunny days or sultry nights; and so, when long-delayed winter turns to spring, you will find me outdoors, in parks and gardens, chased by a sense of dread.

When I'd visited the gardens just one week earlier, the magnolias were all in bud; but had I visited a week later, the magnolia blossoms would have been over, they would have been past peak.  Two consecutive days of warm temperatures had driven the trees into voluptuous generosity.



I.
I may live for plants, but other people live for the fine weather; and last weekend we met together on this terrain.

II.
My late grandmother used to say that flowers were the evidence of God's grace; but Darwin and Mendel had anticipated her.  Early spring is a time of yellow for reasons that have nothing to do with scriptures or sacristies or the pastoral flock waiting for its Sunday sermon.  Counterposed to the chaste white of daffodils, the brazen, bold gold of forsythia and daffodils and witch hazel (my uncle's favorite) serves a human need: for color, for optimism, when winter hasn't quite relinquished its grip.  It doesn't come during the depths of winter, mind you, but at the end: and so I suppose that my grandmother and I could meet in the middle.  Because, after browsing the dull natural garden at the Brooklyn Botanic, I realized that nature has no need for this optimism, for the emotional encouragement that comes at the harshest, coldest part of winter, when you have exhausted all your reserves.  It's man who requires it, and it's man who's bred and spread these brightly-colored flowers.


III.
There were exactly two cherry blossom trees in bloom on the great lawn of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, and each was encircled by Japanese tourists, arms aloft as they held their cameras, as though caught in a moment of ecstatic worship.  Similar clusters formed by the lake, to photograph the carp - "Honeeee d'youseethatfish!" a woman shrieked.

At the far end of the lake, where the water ends in a rump, identical carp circled, purse-lipped and un-photographed, repeating their gestures like perpetual understudies.

IV.: meeting absolutely nobody on this terrain:

But I'm betting it all on the ferns.  I skimmed the lake's edge as tourists cooed over cherry blossom trees as indiscrete and promiscuous as a middle-school girl early to develop.  Here I found licorice ferns and royal ferns, deer and chain ferns; the thick stemmed wood fern, the Tokyo wood fern, the Dixie wood fern, Clinton's wood fern and Goldie's wood fern; the interrupted fern and (accordingly?) the sensitive fern and (driven to it by desperation?) the shield fern; the autumn fern and the curiously-named blistle fern; the maidenhair fern, the evergreen maidenhair fern, the lady fern, the articulate lady fern, and the painted lady fern...