Those
neighborhoods are old and the houses are not crammed so close together but have
room to breathe, to be. Long winding curbs and slowly the residential crescents
and roads seem to lead down to ravine pathways. The morning began warmly but
turned into cold storm. It’s a liminal month, the month of Mothers, and the
weather is capricious. Yet, there is something about the rain that is as good
as the sun, though such an argument could not be won. Evocative but without a
subject, it makes us think and reach on some level for what it means to say. Is
it a film that we can’t recall? A time? A pattern or place? A person? It
patters on shingles and it runs itself in a small current before heading down
old grates, tested and true, to the run-offs and ravines. And what of the
trees? They have had decades to grow. Some are full and ripened but short at
their peak, while others are tall and thin. Many are in-between. The Magnolia
trees that live there are high in their own right. The rain was still on them
when the late afternoon sun made an appearance and splashed itself on the dark
streets, across window sills and grassy boulevards, and on the trunks and
flowering branches themselves. Their bounty is not fruit but beauty. How could
an ornament ever overtake nature’s wisdom after the spring rain? I saw that the
trees were white and pink and both water-drenched and sun-kissed at the same
time. Behind them were smart and sure houses and above was the new afternoon
sun that looked around blue skies. There is not a replacement in painting or
photograph, in vignette or film, for the crafting that time itself takes to
form the mature Magnolia trees. There branches were interesting sections with
myriad pages and the pages were filled with poems. And though the trees were
old they were, in that late afternoon sun, quite alive and new again.
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