Suburban Soliloquies #5

~Spring Comes to Suburbia~

Walking is my favourite form of meditation. It is one of the best features of my companionship with a dog, that I find myself obligated to set aside a certain amount of time every day for my peripatetic meditation. The other night, before it rained, Boris [Kuma-san Chaliapin, my 190 pound Newfoundland dog, not to be mistaken for a descendant of Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin, the great, Russian operatic basso of a previous generation] and I took our constitutional around Samuel Everitt Elementary School. The school is a single-level brick structure. Each classroom has an inside door emptying into a long hallway, and a row of windows with an outside door opening onto the school yard. This is a large piece of property that incorporates two softball fields, a basketball court, and two playgrounds, plus a long expanse of grass. When my parents first moved to Levittown, Pennsylvania, thirty-seven years ago, I entered the fifth grade of this very school, named for the farmer who donated the property. And in the middle of the night I was returning to this school for my continuing education. As I walked the perimeter of the property in search of philosophical insight or spiritual enhancement, the unleashed Boris navigated a circle closer to the school in hope of finding a student’s abandoned lunch or dropped candy bars. A line of towering trees formed a dark and ragged wall that marked the edge of the school’s property on this overcast night. At the foot of this wall was a smaller tree vaguely glowing. My mother tells me that we are descended directly from Aaron, the brother of stuttering Moses, so who knows; I walked over to this small tree to see if it would talk to me, as did the burning bush to Moses of old. This eerie vision turned out to be a blossoming dogwood with nothing to say to me, but nonetheless beautiful.

As I continued my journey along the edge of the woods, I came across a tree that had fallen. At some time in the recent past this tree, rotten in its center, surrendered to gravity's unrelenting pull. Across my path the trunk extended for at least fifty feet. Huge limbs had broken off on impact. I felt almost certain that there was a message here for me, but I couldn't decipher it. A tree shouldn’t die in Spring. Did this tree die from its own efforts to lift water and put forth leaves? In any case, the tree's falling did not intersect in time with my walking by, there was that little blessing to count. Then there was the nagging question that arose uninvited to my thoughts and commenced annoying me - if a tree falls in the forest . . . .

The following day in the city, after it had rained, tulips were displayed in the occasional strips of geometric flower beds that are crammed into the available spaces. At storefronts flower pots appeared on the sidewalks and newly potted pansies decorated the window boxes. In the country, distances formerly visible through the tracery of naked limbs were now curtained by branches densely packed with leaves. Spring patched up the unsightly views of abandoned cars and littered roadways. In Levittown the new growth concealed the power lines and telephone wires carried by poles through everybody's backyard. Suburbia was absorbed by nature's rejuvenation.

Levittown is looking beautiful, and maybe that's all the truth I need to know. In suburbia, where the branches of the trees extend out over the black asphalt streets, just now darkened because of the earlier rain, they have cast green and yellow shadows made up of petals. With every burst of wind it snows fruit tree blossoms.