Sunday morning: I’ve taken my writing-book out to the backyard, where I can sit on this bench and be warmed like a lizard for the first time this year. Surely Spring has arrived!
The yard is so tiny, the fences so high, that in winter the sun never reaches the ground: the best it can do is light up the fence, or the washing when I peg it out on the line and lift it with the prop. Then like a schooner in full sail it catches any breeze. The grass has been mossy and waterlogged for lack of sunlight. In February I bought a small cherry tree, hoping in a few years, even at the Winter Solstice, it would reach up and catch the feeblest rays. Today it still stands in shade, being, at five feet, shorter than I. Most days we stand side by side, for I go to inspect its buds, imperceptibly swelling but still not burst open. The garden has few other features. My gaze goes past the washing, through still-bare neighbouring trees, to the sky, this yard’s most precious element, today a glorious blue.
I hear a rush and gurgle, like a mountain stream. It reminds me of the spring near my grandmother’s house, housed in a sandstone grotto. The water flowed from a granite lion’s mouth into a granite bowl and overflowed to a gravel floor where ferns grew. We always drank with cupped hands from the lion’s mouth, not the bowl. Then we kept silent till we went up the hill to the Wishing Tree and walked round it three times. Perhaps our wishes were fulfilled but I’ve forgotten mine. Today’s rush and gurgle is bathwater sluicing down the outside drain. When it stops, my ears are tuned to the Sunday morning hush, a blest ambience in which friendly sounds are carried: the drone of a bee, the murmurs of conversations, birdsong, faint cries in the distance, children’s excited footsteps up an alley, somewhere a radio. At a tangent, I think of Richard Feynman’s childhood in Far Rockaway—the very name evokes that blessed place:
On foot or on their bicycles, Far Rockaway’s children had free run of a self-contained world: ivy-covered houses, fields, and vacant lots. No one has yet isolated the circumstances that help a child grow whole and independent, but they were present. … In Far Rockaway boys and girls still percolated through the neighborhood and established their own paths through backyards and empty lots behind the houses and streets.
This is from James Gleick’s biography, Genius. It was that distant radio that put me in mind of Feynman, that and backyards and children playing. For he gained a special reputation in his Far Rockaway childhood: “He fixes radios by thinking!” *
Here in my backyard, something glints on a fence-post: it’s resin oozed from a knot in the wood, that reflects the sun like a cluster of tiny topaz. A large yellow butterfly, a Brimstone, flutters over the fence and back again, a couple of times. I’m glad this solid high fence (I wish it were lower and less solid) doesn’t keep out wild visitors. The butterfly’s coming-and-going reminds me of something: a haiku! the first one I ever heard. The words escape me but I see an image retained for fifty years: a butterfly going up and down, back and forth, along a row of crops, like a seamstress sewing a hem. I know it’s not my imagination, for I see the context: a classroom, my English teacher, the Rev. Robert Bowyer. We are doing Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. I don’t see the connection but he suddenly recites us this haiku and enthuses about it.
Today I go indoors to search on Google for the actual words, lost through the sieve of memory. An article from Time Magazine comes up. The date corresponds accurately to that point in my school career, that classroom, that teacher. I was sixteen. The article begins as follows:
“Haiku Is Here
“Monday, Feb. 02, 1959
“Up the barley rows, stitching, stitching them together, a butterfly goes.—Sora (1648-1710)
Read the full text here.
I’m delighted by this discovery. My teacher was born too early for the World-Wide Web, relied on Time to keep in touch with the wider world.
My backyard too is linked to the world, is part of the world, contains the world, with all its evolutionary. As in these Notes. As in the Web. Life is precious and slips through our fingers like the water from a constant spring.
* Title of a chapter in Feynman’s book of reminiscences: Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman: adventures of a curious character
a wayfarer’s notes 
Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman is one of my favorite books. I see me in a lot of it, only he was smarter than I am.
I have an old love seat outside under a little shelter, with a franklin fireplace in front of it.
I like to set out there and ponder with the cosmos.
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It is lovely to be near a young tree like you are, to daily watch the swelling buds, the dainty leaves. It's an intimate experience that is alien to most people.
(I love “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman” too! Such a down-to-earth person.)
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Absolutely Delightful Vincent!
Trying to restrain myself, I must tell this…as soon as I read of the cherry tree, I thought, I should tell Vincent to tell the tree I said 'grow please, you now have plenty of sunlight', for that might work by 'thinking', like the boy fixes the radios, lol, (re: last comment other post, arrogant…of ME, to say the least!),
the Haikus are marvelous, and your words at the ending, “Life is precious and slips through our fingers like the water from an eternal spring.”, just as sensitive and delicate!
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Jim, thanks for the suggestion, but until that tree grows it won't get sunlight even on a good day (perhaps in summer). But I know it is good to talk to trees, but I hear that threatening them and showing them an axe can be best for those which refuse to fruit, at least in Malaysia.
Richard Feynman didn't fix radios by merely thinking and not touching them. This is according to his story, reminiscing on his childhood. Someone had a problem with a radio which made a terrible howling when it warmed up and he paced back & forth. He was thinking and then formed a hypothesis – to swap the valves around. (Strangely, this happened to me exactly the same when I bought an old radio when I was about 16. I swapped the valves and it worked fine.)
I changed “eternal” (presumptuous) for “constant”. There is a suburb of Kingston, Jamaica, called “Constant Spring”.
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Hayden, Billy: I'm glad you have both read “Surely you're Joking Mr Feynman”. He was indeed a fine man.
Each Spring I have the sense that Nature is creeping up on me unawares: before I know it this or that blossom is at peak, or sometimes is in decline before I notice.
Pondering with the cosmos – yes, we sit in the same air and can ponder together. that Benjamin Franklin was no stranger to these parts, for he was a friend of Sir Francis Dashwood and a member of his Hell Fire Club. In his frequent transatlantic visits he would have passed back and forth along the road where I lived till recently, perhaps mentally inventing his Franklin stove.
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vincent
thanks for the recent posts…
this writing is wonderful–the sun never reaching the ground–wish I had written that.
A poem is contained in your words–and a good one at that.
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Vincent I envy your knowledge, your memories and your vision.
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If all humans had a piece of ground like that, especially in childhood when our sensibilities are being formed, the world would be a better place.
“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.”
-Wordsworth
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i really didn't get what you were trying to say, sorry for my limited grey cells.
but it read very nice. and i liked mixing and mashing your childhood experience, it gives color to whatever you say. sort of fudging present with a lost world. surreal.
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Vincent,
You must have affected my dreams, again, for this morning, I dreamed of standing next to a flowering tree. It's a magical kind of synchronicity to come to your blog today and read of your experience with your little baby tree.
Your memory is exceptional! To remember the verse about the butterfly is very enviable. And I must say, the photograph that you've attached to this post is striking! It almost stole my breath away.
Happy spring to you!
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Well, Sophia, I did not remember the words of the haiku, but only the image. A tribute to both the author and the translator.
And the tree buds have now burst. I thought that blossoms might come first, but it's leaves. And I still don't know if it is a male or female tree.
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Ghetufool, I know you have sufficient grey cells. I think there is a cultural thing here, so that for example the relevance of the shift to Far Rockaway was not apparent. to my mind, the significance is that today, technology in UK has separated us from the simple sensual things. People, especially children, stay indoors more than they used to. It is not so true amongst the local population in this enclave because they are have Pakistani or Kashmiri and therefore more natural roots.
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Paul, that is one of the Wordsworth stanza that I remember too! Well my wife comes from rural Jamaica and didn't have a piece of ground to look after as a child but a chicken and later a goat, and that is the way it was for those who lived in the rural areas. And to that extent the world is a better place though she would be the first to admit that some of her countrymen rather make it a worse place.
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Lady in Red, I can envy you too, if I set myself to it!
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O Scot, I am glad to know you, a real poet.
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