Earth Day 2021
Right outside my door, an early-blooming cherry tree is showering the flagstone walk with pink. The trees these days — have you looked at them? The cherries and the redbuds are so bright and rosy, it’s almost hard to believe they’re real. They’re like things someone decorated for a child’s birthday party.
I remember this feeling. I have it every spring — the sense that color has just been invented. The daffodils are so yellow. The grass in the yards and the new leaves on the trees are so green — I can’t get over it! I can’t stop staring. I want to tell them how amazing they are.
Actually, I have started telling them. Maybe it’s the Covid isolation, but I’ve found myself talking to the trees. I say hello to the cherry when I leave the house, greet my neighbor’s dogwood. Flowers and garden creatures, too. I say good morning to the Virginia bluebells, the trillium, the spreading forget-me-nots. I hail the robin on the branch, the carpenter bees living in the shed, even the rabbits that destroyed last year’s tulips. (This year, I’m spraying with garlic-and-red-pepper-infused water. So far, so good.)
It’s been a hard year. For many of us, things are still hard. My impression of the people I know is that more of them are struggling now than a year ago. Last April, there might have been more panic, but right now there seems to be more despair: Covid, police killings, vaccine conspiracy theories, unemployment, climate change.
I’m not really a naturey person, though I have tried to be one. But I love the spring flowers and trees. I’m grateful for the way the blossoms arrive in familiar waves, marking the passage of time. And I like the way they connect me to people I have known and loved.
When I talk to the flowers, I remember where I got them from. I dug the trillium from my parents’ Maryland woods, and the flowers connect me to my childhood. I bought some of my bulbs from the Swarthmore Horticultural Society (whose volunteers make every trip to the library a walk through beauty), and the tulips remind me of my connection to this town. A small clump of the now-sprawling forget-me-nots was given to me by a dear friend.
It’s Earth Day, by the way. This is my Earth Day editorial. When I started thinking about writing it, I thought that, given the way things are going, the piece was likely to be pretty dark. Probably I should use this space to spell out some of the climate challenges we face and suggest some solutions.
This is not that editorial. Maybe you’ve already read that one somewhere else, anyway.
This editorial is about the possibility of finding pleasure — solace — in the world around us. This editorial is saying: Go outside! Look at the Earth and what’s growing from it. Stand under a cherry tree and let the wind shower you with pink.
Rachel Pastan
Editor
