April Notes
Skinks, The Beatles, and the tension of death 🦎
Last week, we found a five-lined skink burrowing in a tub of potting soil. I’d seen him scampering along the brick wall, his black skin lined bright yellow and blue—such joyful colors! The kids and I watched him in delight for a good 15 minutes before setting him loose. I had to use the potting soil after all.
Tuesday I found him belly up on the carport, tailless. I’d caught our dog chasing him a few times, and my guess is, the skink lost the race, and Gus had a few moments of fatal enjoyment.
It made me terribly sad. Yes, wild things die all the time. Yes, there are arguably worse horrors happening to human beings right now, worthy of great sadness. I dug around for a reason, as I do, and here’s all I can articulate:
The senseless death of anything, no matter how delightful or small or common, is sad. Would I have been less sad if a hawk had eaten it? Probably. Would I have been less sad if the kids and I had never interacted with it? Absolutely.
But ultimately, ultimately, death in all forms is unnatural. Yes, it’s just a skink, but let me use its death as an ebenezer of sorts. Something inside our being rears up against death, no matter the form it takes. And our cultural reaction is to rein that bucking in. It’s why we say things like “everything happens for a reason.” And while in a cosmic sense I believe that’s true, my finite being does not have the capacity to understand how it all works out in the end. Instead, the phrase becomes a copout, a way to numb the reality, the horror, that life in all its beautiful complexity, ends. And sometimes it ends in truly terrible, senseless ways.
I realize the irony of writing about death in a newsletter called Signs of Life. I don’t have a nice and neat way to tie this all up. All I can say is let me be sad about the death of the skink. All I can say is I’m banking up a robust hope in a life after this one.
Gratitudes
I. The Beatles
We’ve been forcing the kids to listen to “grownup” music. On hearing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for the first time, our Lucy spontaneously hopped up on the couch and started flapping her wings. Walker proceeded to find her some diamonds. I burst every. single. time.
II. Spring, spring, spring
In lieu of flower updates, I’d just like to say that despite the weird high temps, April has been a grand show. While I do enjoy the things I planted (peonies and irises, certainly), I’ve been reveling in the azalea, rhododendron, and mountain laurel the previous owner left behind.
Poems
Fire Light
A forest fire ravages a few miles north
The air is thick with it
And yet I am being undone by the way the western sun is making love to the pink azalea
Amber kisses on every blossom
It is a brilliant thing, a holy thing
For a moment I am clear—there are unfathomable depths of beauty in this world.
For a moment I am clear—there are unfathomable depths of darkness.
I cannot hold them in my hand.
Poppies
The poppies I sowed last October have been decapitated by my daughter.
She plucked their heads off one by one,
Not out of malice or caprice.
She simply wondered.
Which is what I did when I saw the blooms burst open for the first time
All delicate lace
By some miracle we both had survived the long cold winter
only to be struck down on a bright spring day by the wonder of a child.
This is life, is it not?
We toil and sweat and rend our muscles.
We endure the cold, push through darkness, hold tight to that warm green thread of hope.
Who was it that said only God can make the flowers grow?
We all must meet our Maker.
love this! Also the poems!!
I was also not prepared for the amount of dead wildlife we would find in our carport when we first moved haha. Way to let it inspire some beauty!