I’ve been reminiscing today. Normally I don’t spend any time at all thinking about the past, my childhood, things like that. I’m living in the present, after all. Its overcast again, a bit gloomy, I’d been writing for a while and graciously allowed myself a breather.

* * * * *

Why is there such a difference between an event we can never forget and an event we will always remember?

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I leaned back and my mind sallied forth into my remembered yesterdays. I used to love driving, when my mother first allowed me to borrow her VW Bug. She was christened Hermionie, by my mother, but I didn’t ever tell my friends her official name. Driving was freedom, then. Still is when I can cruise down highways doing 75 to Door County, or on spring break to Washington D.C., or on any trip away from routine and toward an adventure.

Then I remembered driving my cousin’s rebuilt Ford Model T, about that same time in my life. My uncle in Iowa City had wisely purchased one well past it’s prime, and along with a mechanic or two and his sons, they’d got that big, boxy beast running, even learning how to fix minor mechanical malfunctions and to change the oil all on their own. That wasn’t why my uncle bought it, though. His sons were as likely to get into trouble as not, and the T’s top speed wasn’t much above 40, downhill. It was built with a whole lot of steel, too. Not like cars today.

I remembered one weekend in college, when I borrowed a friend’s MG, my brother borrowed a friend’s Triumph, and off the two of us went for a drive across and over country roads, neither knowing what that strip of blacktop was called or where we were going to spend the night, just driving those old sportsters for the sheer fun of it. God, what a romp through the north woods we had!

* * * * *

Where once the car was sex symbol, and virility was at stake, what I drove and my enjoyment in the act were one.

* * * * *

Somewhere between then and now driving has become a chore. I’ve come to think of this place where I live as Faraway, since everything where I live is a hike. Grocery store: 10 minutes. High school: 10 minutes. Book store: 15 and 20 minutes, respectively. Gas station: 7 minutes. Sporting events: anywhere between 10 and 40 minutes (amateur or professional).

* * * * *

I’ve spent the last month driving in and out of potholes the like of which you can scarcely imagine. Both my car and I are overdue for an alignment.

* * * * *

We own three cars now, one for the teenagers, and teenagers by themselves are expensive, let alone the cost of maintaining three vehicles. This year so far I’ve had the rotors replaced ($900), a tie-rod fixed ($85), and two oil changes ($27 each). My daughter is also talented at getting her dad to spring for gas. Just this morning I woke to find a note she’d left requesting a full tank before she had to leave for school at 6:45 a.m. Seven minutes each way. (Last weekend she and her mom returned from shopping with a very pretty prom dress at a very reasonable price ($175), and in a fit of gratitude I’d offered a tank of gas ($47). Now, if only some boy works up the nerve to ask, it’ll all work out.)

* * * * *

That same daughter caused her mother and I some brittle moments this past winter, learning to drive while also learning to navigate through snow and ice. I noted with some surety that as often as not it was the inexperienced teenager who managed to put their car into the ditch beside the road, and often then on a straightaway with no reason to be steering in any direction but straight on. I’m becoming convinced the state allows 16 year olds the rights to drive simply because, in its infinite wisdom, it knows the younger they are the softer their bones.

* * * * *

I just got a call from the Dentist’s office. I’d missed my 10:30 appointment (20 minutes). I was focused on writing, in the now as it were (after my detour down memory lane), and I’d completely let matters lapse. Time ceased. Of course time is important, and I’ve got to remember, when I lapse into the now (or time past if its on hand) that planting one foot in the here and now might help this body I inhabit get itself there when (Crown: $1200).

A friend of mine just got back from a year long sabbatical. Actually, it was a year of traveling across this country. What a grand adventure!

She has one daughter, now 20 and away at college. A year ago she realized a deep sense of something missing in her life. Like me, she had gone right through college to grad school to career, getting married, raising a child. Each step preordained, natural, a progression. Still, she had this itch.

She traveled back and forth across this country twice. Along the way she’d stop at innumerable points of interest. And along with her on this journey was a Pez dispenser. She’d been given this treasure from a friend at a party a bunch of us threw her prior to her departure. The friend had grown up with Mary, and it was to remind her of her earlier years (lest she become lost). It was nothing more than a prop, yet Pez ended up being featured in all her pictures from her travels. Mary and Pez in Wisconsin at a cheese shop. Mary and Pez in Wyoming standing mighty close to a buffalo. Mary and Pez in Florida on the beach.

One of the things she realized along the way was this nugget. She had come to think of raising her daughter as something akin to flying a kite, whose string Mary had been holding since birth, guiding that kite through the winds, keeping it aloft. With that daughter now away at college, Mary discovered the truth was as much the opposite. It was the daughter who had, in large measure, been the pivot point, the anchor in Mary’s life.

Of course, children can be a great alibi. ‘I didn’t accomplish what I set out to do, but then,’ pointing to my child, I can say with great affection and total sincerity, ‘I was concerned with larger affairs. I was peopling the earth.’

There’s something more you should know about Mary. At that party which kicked this whole journey off, I met her entire family. There, I learned that her family kidded her about always asking why. A curious child was Mary. She’d look for the meaning in everything. “She’d look for the deeper meaning in a sneeze!” was declared by her sister.

Mary’s advice: should you set out on your adventure, be cautiously exuberant. You’ve got to be exuberant to even brave such an adventure, and cautious because you never know who’s going to be returning. Mary reconnected with parts of herself she had lost touch with through the years, such as spontaneity and the sheer exuberance of life. They were as intrinsic to her being as anything that had been in the forefront since career and family.

Lastly, you’re going to need a prop to take along. It matter not what you choose. What matters is that it will force you to strike up conversations with people along the way, if for no other reason that to get them to take your picture.

Mary’s now back. She’s changing careers. She’s living in the now. She’s full of life. And while we who know her are all happy for her, we’re also a bit jealous. At least, I am.

I walked outside this morning just as the sun was lighting up the east. The sky above was a striking robin’s egg blue, but as the natural is want to do, the pale blue wasn’t pale, wasn’t surface. There was a translucence that harkened to something more.

It occurred to me, as I looked up and went through these thoughts, that it was the first time I had timed this moment perfectly - for it wasn’t long before that sky was white-washed, paler, less vivid. Nor was it long since the inky black stillness of space was holding the twinkling of stars. Then I thought about being in the moment. I vowed to wake up and notice a few more things, for the first time, from whatever was around me, during the rest of my day.

But first, the care and feeding of the girls.

* * * * *

As I set out on today’s adventure, I looked all around. Ever notice how painted-on colors are flat? How the inanimate is somehow duller that the animated? The black of a metal light pole, say, to the depth held within the coat of feathers of a black bird. Or the green of the plastic newspaper bins affixed to mailboxes around here to the iconic living green of, say, the shoots of daffodils and paperwhites poking up out of just thawing ground.

* * * * *

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.” (Pablo Picasso)

* * * * *

Rain, rain mixed with snow, rain. Today finally gave way to sunshine, which helped me to notice how the sun side-lighting the empty tree branches turned their brown bark into a glowing amber. How the sun passing through the dogwood animated its orange-red twigs. How a red barn casts a blue shadow. How even the reflected light of the sun within my dark garage seemed somehow to glow.

* * * * *

In “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Robert Frost has a line describing an April moment when air and sky has that certain feeling, but suddenly a cloud crosses the path of sun and a bitter little wind takes you back to March. Today there was the promise of warmth upon setting out, but there was the rebuff as well.

* * * * *

Can something as formless as sunlight, which in itself cannot be seen, in some small way reveal something beyond the form it illuminates?

On this walk I took, the life around me seemed more animated. The birds were louder, their numbers seemingly increased, their joy in being increased in measure by the feeling of that long awaited sun and the energy it suffused into their little lives.

That same light colored my walk today. Its shimmer, its essence, its celestial lightness is the color of this day as I walk the same route as yesterday, yet see as if for the first time.

Today I ought to head outdoors and scythe the perennial grasses to the ground before the new green growth gets in the way. As long as I am in the beds, I should shear the shrub twigs that the deer somehow managed to ignore. Then to the garage and back with a rake to spruce things up, then to the compost pile with leaf litter and grass.

While in the garage I should push the snow blower out and run it ‘til empty. Then move the mower front and center, fill it with gas, and put the snow blower in its summer back place. On second thought, I ought put the mower in the trunk and head to the dealer, and get that damn self adjusting right wheel bolted in place.

While in the garage I should pick up the heavy pruner and bow saw, and head out to the back where tree branches are dangling. After a winter of wind and snow, while in the back, I should definitely pick up all the fallen twigs and branches and put them in the pile for later hauling to the brush dump. Then there’s the mucking out of the pond feature, and I really ought to drain the black water and refill, after I haul out the hoses from the garage. And I really shouldn’t delay in hauling out the patio furniture, which will entail backing the car out of the garage.

I ought to finish taking in the Christmas lights on the shrubs out front, which got buried under snow and locked in ice. I should put them away in their rightful container, and while I’m in the basement, I should flush the drain tiles of their accumulated sludge. First, though, I must take a trip to the hardware store and purchase 100′ of clean hose, which I’ve been meaning to do since last fall.

If I’m to be in the basement, after visiting the hardware store, I ought first check to see whether a replacement air filter is on hand, which I think won’t be found, as the replacement replaced the previous just last fall. And while I’m at it, and before I depart, it would be wise to take stock of our store of water softening salt. It also occurs to me that new leather work gloves should be located, as the current ones were found lacking when hacking and hauling the rose bush last fall. And I ought to find a new pruner to replace the one dropped last fall.

While I’m out and about I should look for a new rim, which I promised my daughter I’d replace along with the net for shooting hoops this summer. I should also hunt for a new mailbox, to replace the falling apart one held together with wire since winter (and I could only figure wire to hold it together since caulk and or glue and -20 degrees are akin to oil and water).

I ought to purchase more twine and re-hang the honeysuckle vine that’s come down, and I should go to the rental place and rent an aerator and loosen the ground (But if I shouldn’t get around to renting and aerating, I should at least purchase two 5000 sq. ft. bags of spring fertilizer, then march the spreader back and forth across the lawn - I should at least do that.)

Seeing as how its late afternoon and there’s dinner yet to prepare, I should stop at the grocery store so I’d really best get going. Specially since its our first meal together as a family in quite a while, and I ought to return the overdue books to the library before I pick up my daughter at softball practice, and you know she hates grocery shopping when there’s a night’s worth of homework looming and explaining suchness at that moment isn’t likely to bear any fruit, whatsoever.

And I ought to be OK with that, too.

We are in early spring, suffering early spring. The day is overcast, having rained since 4 am when the thunderclap woke me. Now subsided to more of a mist, a robin is singing some song or other but he should have held his peace, for he is a false prophet. More raw than rain would suggest, spring dallies somewhere in the offing while snow mounds suffer its onslaught.

* * * * *

I was reminded today that we’re changing from glove hunting season to umbrella hunting season. I could have sworn we had more than many. Where would I have put it so I could find it come spring?

* * * * *

I have just returned, having knocked off walking somewhere north of 5 miles, my calves being as stiff as an old paint brush. All of the sedentary routine of winter paying its respects upon my frame. But I had to get out, between downpours, to reacquaint myself with the world beyond.

* * * * *

It seems more difficult than previous to be one with nature in winter. I have hazy recollections of the peace and stillness that comes upon a snowstorm, when cross country skiing in the Kettle Moraine. Or the shear aliveness I remember when riding ice cakes down the river. My routine of shoveling first my driveway and then my father inlaw’s, a near record snow fall total this year, the pestering need to rake the heavy snow off the second story roof after first hauling an extension ladder through knee-deep snow, icy roads and teenage drivers under said roof all conspired to take the thrill out of the season.

* * * * *

So, out I went and, between shivers, thought of last summer. (Can it only be 9 months since the heat wave last August? No one was saying it wasn’t hot, what with the windows stick, the glasses fog and the air smells of rot. Even the water bugs turned their feet up and lay on their backs, breathing heavily. 130 degrees in the shade, if memory serves. Ahh, the pleasures of family get-togethers, this time in Hilton Head, planned two years before. I wasn’t remembering the terrible discomfort of sticky shirts, perspiration racing from forehead to chin, or that certain chafing down lower. What I remembered was the warmth of early morning walks along the beach, lounging in the shallow end like frogs both mornings and afternoons, or after dark reunions with extended family alongside the pool.)

On my walk I found the first signs that spring is near. The pale green just now emerging from underneath the drab yellow of matted grass. Then I looked closer and saw a few green shoots of something thrusting out of mother earth. I admit I saw this because, due to my aching calves, I had slowed to a crawl. Then I stopped altogether. An unusually large bird I’d never seen before, with a black coat, small red head and throat, was looking down at me from its perch in the tree above. We stared at each other for a time, then it called out - ‘thock, thock, thock.’

The sound reverberated within me, and not just from the decibels.

I was greeted upon my return by a flock of red wing blackbirds conspiring in the three trees grouped to the side of our front door. All seemingly eager to twill their sweet melody at once, all confirming their joy in living this day, and all too quickly alighting as if one to spread their message down the lane.