On the comfort of color
Amber, Almodóvar, and a poem about April
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much forsythia and daffodils in one place,” I say to my spouse Janyce as we’re driving the back roads on Saturday afternoon. It’s been raining all day on the Cape, sometimes a pelting rain, sometimes a misty haze that fools us into thinking we can take the dog out on a beach walk, and then it turns back to rain.
We’re here on a final work weekend before the summer rental season to put in solar lights along the steps, wash the green moss off of the back deck, and switch out the fuzzy winter pillow covers on the couch with the blue floral and striped ones.
The grayness of the day seems to accentuate all the flowers outside and it lifts my sagging spirits. I’ve been collecting images of yellow in my cellphone all month. First it was a gold velvet chair I bought on a whim, then it was a perfect earl gray and lemon craft cocktail, and finally a bouquet of daffodils for the Easter table plucked from a dinner guests’ very own yard. This weekend it’s the overabundance of forsythia at every turn in Chatham.
There used to be a time when I would delight in all this garish yellow on the lawns of so many quaint shingle-style houses. But my tastes are evolving with age and climate change and I long to see whatever native plants would naturally grow in its place. More of what the internet calls “spring ephemerals” and less of the invasive English ivy that has been crawling up the scrub pines for years now, strangling the less hardy ones, and creating a spiky green carpet over the entire wooded part of the back yard. But I get the appeal of all this brightness, too. These days I welcome a showy display of misplaced English garden flowers to announce loudly to me that spring is coming back, and possibly my hope for the future along with it.
We stop in the center of town and grab a parking spot right in front of the neighborhood theater. It’s still only April, so the downtown is mostly empty. We’ve planned plenty of time to grab a beer and a sandwich before the matinee showing of a dopey movie about a dog.
“What?!” says Janyce, reading out loud from the paper printout on the entrance door. “The 2:30 showing of The Friend has been sold out.”
I’m not all that bothered by this. We can have lunch and later I can find a new zippered sweatshirt in one of the shops, I think to myself.
“You still want to eat here?” says Janyce.
“Sure,” I say.
I look out the window from my place at the bar and it’s raining steadily again. A family of four are milling about with a baby stroller and their two young children. The youngest one escapes the stroller to sprint-toddle her way to the candy counter, laughing. Her young parents take turns following closely behind her while the six year old is dutifully sitting at her place at the table quietly amusing herself.
Janyce and I share a small Cuban sandwich and drink our amber colored beers sleepily.
“We can see a movie tonight in Dennis” she says. “I’ll buy the tickets now. 7pm showing.”
“That dorky penguin one?” I say.
“Hey, take that back. It’s good!” she says.
“Okay, but let’s go back home and watch a movie on Netflix or something today, too.” I say. “Maybe even a nap.”
Later at home, with the dog splayed out between us on the bed, I balance the computer on my lap as we watch the latest Almodóvar film. It’s not his best. Something feels stilted with the conversation and Janyce is dozing while watching, but I hesitate to turn it off. Pedro Almodóvar is a master of color and I’m mesmerized by Tilda Swinton in a bright yellow suit, and Julianne Moore in electric green against a bright red background.
I’m happy to see spring return for sure, but I feel a sadness to the season, and a chill over the country. And it seems to me that I’m going through the motions too much. I think my friend captures a similar feeling in his poem about a sudden April snow on daffodils.
April (Snow) Showers by Michael Patrick Rutter Daffodils, all at once, fold into downward dog coaxed by an unseen yogi whispering ‘and there you are’ whisps of smoky breath curl, then pause shadowboxing the air. Everyone here, all at once thinks it: why stay? Two seasons, tops one now offering an unwanted sauna and the other, yawning color, cold comforts and the in-between everlasting mud, regret, darkness. Everyone else, all at once infers: they stay because… tradition and roots too thick to cut kids, community, politics a moat for liberal ilk interest rates and exhaustion moving away never moves enough traffic, death, and taxes? all self-resolving problems north stars for the inert. We say, all at once the cow path streets align with time, patience the density delivers us from loneliness from being landlocked the hardness of frozen ground mitigates the madness of wide-open spaces, of too many bad choices. Thoreau found peace at a pond, and we’ve swum there, in clammy mossy water, without a care. We stay behind, all at once, as our hearts feel happy contained secure in a ring box we need never open to know the gold is true to know the rock will shine with or without sun.