Pat the Moss

...or perhaps lie down on it, as if it were a rug by the fire.

It is a blue noon, sandwiched between the greys of morning and afternoon. The sky, I mean. So persistently cloud-covered, so unforgivingly steeled against any errant ray of sunshine. March is like the Tin Man, looking for the heart of spring. Like Dorothy, I am waiting for the black and white to change to color.

And then for an hour or so, it does. I can tell by the way the office is filling up with light, bouncing off the ceiling. Though I’m facing east, I know the sun is streaming in through the western windows.

I decide to take a break and head down to the compost pile with the coffee grounds. Seriously important errand. Must be performed at noontime. Roger that.

On the deck, I turn my face to the sun for a moment. A rabbit shoots out from under the deck stairs, dashing to the woods so fast he nearly leaves his cottontail behind. The same rabbit as always? Nah, I think not. Many kin living down there. They’ve a warren under the garage stairs, too.

I step down on to the moss – a wide swath of chartreuse, a moss among mosses in our yard, which resembles a Google Earth snapshot of the Everglades. So many strange hues of rusty green and barky emerald and minty grey.

Looking at the hairy carpet beneath my boots, I am captivated. I kneel down and run my hands over it. Hmmm. Surprisingly warm and lumpy like an old dog. It feels truly alive and radiant and I discover that kneeling is not enough. I must sit down on it, cross-legged, and smooth it out with my hands. Over and over.

Later I will ask my friend Margaret Curtin, Island plant lady extraordinaire and Polly Hill Arboretum research associate, what this hairy moss is. And I will learn that I’m not the first to have the urge to lie on the moss as if it were a rug by the fire.

She writes:

“The moss in the photo is Dicranum scoparium, a very common – but lovely! – moss. It’s often described as looking like an animal pelt…the kind of pelt on which you would want to rest your head. One of its common names is swept broom moss because, as you can see, each little branch of it is swept to one side, like a well-used, old-fashioned hearth broom.”

She adds that it is one of more than 100 mosses on the Island that she knows about.

I sit for a few more minutes and imagine building a fairy house with the acorns and twigs and pebbles strewn over the moss. The other day we found an antler in the field. Just a little one. I wonder where the deer shed the rest. I could use that in my fairy house, too. I’d make the roof out of the bark peeling off the firewood stacked and listing precariously at the edge of the woods, abandoned to the fungi and decomposers long ago.

Sitting there, I’m reminded of how much my best friend Eliza and I loved to make mud pies, how we loved to build forts, to go on expeditions in the woods, to go down to the creek, hopscotch to the other side on the flat backs of boulders, find the forbidden rope swing on the other side. We were eight, nine, ten, even older. We carried a notebook, recorded our findings — and whether we had peanut butter or tuna sandwiches for lunch.

As I rest on the warm moss I am carried back to the before-times, before I got teenage-insecure and twenties-anxious and thirties-looney and forties-wrung-out. Somewhere along the way, the bright colors faded. Small wonders slipped away, sharp details blurred. I didn’t exactly know I was living in the black and white – the black and white of a fuzzy 1960s television set missing its rabbit ears, no less.

I didn’t know, that is, until the color and focus returned. I distinctly remember looking up at the leaves on the trees one day and thinking what a beautiful color and shape they were. It was like I was in fourth grade all over again, putting on my first pair of eyeglasses and finally being able to see the blackboard.

What I had now were sobriety glasses. At first they didn’t quite fit on my nose, tuck neatly behind my ears, or offer the exact prescription I needed. It takes a long time to find the right pair. Then you wind up outgrowing those and needing new ones.

I wonder if I’d be sitting on a patch of moss in the middle of the day if it weren’t for the sobriety glasses I wear now. They’re almost like binoculars; they pick up even the smallest ships of wonder sailing across the horizon.

Eventually, I make it down to the field where the compost pile is, next to the wood chips and the lichen-lacquered split-rail fence and not far from where the hoop house will be. But I have to stop thrice more along the way – to see if the young stewartia saplings we planted last year have buds on them (yes!). To see if the rhubarb is coming up (yes!). To see if the pansies I planted in the well of a three-oak cluster last fall have re-seeded (no!).

It is a miracle that I get back to my desk without an hour passing by. As I go inside, the sky greys up again, the temperature drops, and somewhere out there Dorothy and Toto are needing to get out of the storm. They’ve got a lot of bad stuff to go through and I worry for them. But they’ll get to the part where the film changes to color – and then best of all, discover where home really is.

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Looking Out

Rain today is grace

out my window,

here inside

a pool of warm soft

prayer for a day

gained like the gift

of a blue hen’s egg

in the barn’s new hay;

a simple wool sweater

cocoon of words and

songs and coffee all

morning and into

afternoon’s breaking

clouds, pushed on

by a front insistent

on sunshine for the

sweet long-shadow

close of day.

— S.E.M., April 29, 2008

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P.S. This is really happening! Hoop-house build out!