"I wasn't wandering in a storm"
It’s forsythia season in Cleveland. I keep forgetting that it’s spring at all and not autumn, and then I see a sheaf of bright yellow blooms and remember. Forsythia are like crocuses and cherries, some of the first flowers to appear in spring, and they always seem to appear overnight. Azaleas and rhododendrons, for example, can be slow starters: first leaves appear, then one blossom, then two, then four, until they attain a demure full bloom, riotous pinks and purples and reds set off by neat foliage. Forsythia arrives early to the party and makes a beeline to the bar — all its bundled branches like an upturned willow tree exploding into gold all at once — a sequined dress, glitter on your nails, the way you dress when you want to catch the light.
There’s a little pop of forsythia right by the porch steps of that house, which Dylan and I drove past on Monday on our way to pick up groceries for the next week or two. It’s a little hard to make out in the photo, but every inch of open space on the porch has been barricaded with a trellis: the gaps between the columns, the top of the stairs. And then, here and there, a little burst of yellow. Forsythia always means spring, and spring always means forsythia. This has been true for me ever since I was a child walking from where my parents still live, in Brooklyn Heights, to school in Cobble Hill. An entire block of Hicks Street between Remsen and Grace Court was lined with forsythia bushes, and they were always the first to bloom, before the hyacinths and daffodils that would later overflow from windowboxes and bricked-in front gardens.
There are some goodbyes you don’t get to say because you don’t realize they’re goodbyes until the moment has come and gone. Most of the time, we get lucky — we can tell when something is changing, or coming to an end, or both. But the farewells that stay with us are the missed chances, the ones that pass in the blink of an eye. Those are the people we remember most clearly, the places we can still visit in our minds. My family used to spend summers at a cabin in Vermont, Rutland County to be specific, where I learned to fish and picked raspberries in the yard and lay out at night on the jetty, which got more rickety every year, watching the Big Dipper rise and far-off satellites blink their slow, tumbling way across the sky. That lake was where my father threatened to throw me into the lake until I taught myself to swim, and where I watched the woods up with fewer and fewer fireflies every year. It’s in my Twitter header image: If you look closely, you can see an open laptop and the shadowy time-lapse ghost of someone sitting in front of it. That’s me in my last year of college writing a senior thesis. You can see the first few dim stars leaving trails across the sky. The sun is already down, so the darkness is coming on faster than you’d expect, and the cooling air already smells of woodsmoke. There’s a path of mismatched flagstones leading from the lake to the cabin, spaced a little less than a pace apart, and the windows are lit up golden, and VPR is playing inside. The first of the evening mosquitoes are starting to whine.
I never got to say goodbye to that cabin, too busy covering the 2016 election to spend a last summer there, so it exists in my mind forever the way I knew it as a child, quiet and wooded and full of enough space for me to slip away and find peace within my own mind. I never got to say goodbye to the old Hall of Gems at the American Museum of Natural History, where I spent a lot of time as a child because it perfectly married my interests (being left alone) with my father’s (rocks). By the time I found out it was being remodeled, it was already closed. As Jezebel writer Aimée Lutkin inimitably put it, “Goodbye, Gem Stone-Studded Womb.” The first time I visited, there was still a mirror over the Saviksoah fragment of the Cape York meteorite (also known as Ahnighito) so that you could see the pennies that innumerable previous visitors had tossed on top of it. The museum got rid of the mirror in the intervening years, but they never fenced the meteorite fragment off. The last time I visited, I could still press my hand against Saviksoah — 31 metric tons of iron, cool to the touch even on the hottest summer day.
I’ve been thinking about all the goodbyes I’ll miss in the weeks to come: the small businesses that have already closed their doors and will never reopen them, the people I’ve fallen out of touch with who I will never be able to talk to again, the gatherings cancelled this year that will never reconvene. Dylan and I found a small ice cream shop in Lakewood a few years ago that made the best strawberry-lemon-basil sorbet, a confectionary miracle that managed to land those flavor notes in precisely that order without once tasting like a pasta sauce catastrophe or wine cooler. It closed permanently last September. As Terry Pratchett might have put it, “JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
We had time, a few last days — not the good ones, but the ones that came afterwards, those odd hours of limbo while we waited to see what came next — to lay down a few last sketches, memories of what used to be. I didn’t visit all the places I wanted to, but some of them were already gone. Pearl Paint on Canal Street closed permanently in 2014, but I can still remember the rickety elevator, the room filled entirely with different kinds and hardnesses of pencil, the smell of gum erasers, the signs on every floor asking you to pay before you ventured into the stairwell with its big wooden handrail. A few months ago, I read Fake Like Me, by Barbara Bourland, and two quick sentences about what it was like to go shopping at Pearl Paint knocked the breath out of me.
At Pearl, I had first dibs on colors, picking out moss and sap green, pale scarlet—fat, cigar-tube rolls, soft, delicious, pure potential. Jonah smiled at me, gave me his discount, asked about my day; our usual routine. Then I bought a coffee, an egg sandwich, and a carton of orange juice from a bodega and headed back home.
It’s so funny, the little details that stop you dead in your tracks. The way my 婆婆, my grandmother on my mother’s side, would sneak extra bites of my favorite foods from her plate to mine, even as my mother objected vocally; the way that paper labels become translucent when rolled around a pigment stick, oil paint in solid form; the way the air feels when it reaches a particular humidity and temperature, as it might on a lakeshore just after sunset. I am at this very moment accumulating more details like little dents and scratches, places where the future will catch — the uneven edge of a fingernail against fabric — and send me instantly back to a place I can only visit in my memories. Maybe it’ll the the way the light looks at a certain time of day, now that I’m home to see it, or the hum of our freezer. Whatever it is, it won’t mean anything to anybody else. There’s an Albert Goldbarth poem about it (there’s an Albert Goldbarth poem about everything).
But it was his name that I sang, his name
that carried the others – his name, now,
was the horse. His name was the altar panel
in which we all took our stilted positions.
And frankly…why is this special?
It isn’t. “Chair.”
“Storm.” “Leaf.” “Books.” “Woman’s hand.”
Every word is an elegy
– at the least, a commemoration.
There is nothing special about any moment except for the way that you feel, the way a burst of yellow blossom makes me realize that it is spring in a way that no birdsong or equinox or rising temperature can, the way it felt to touch meteoric iron on a July day when the sidewalks were baking and the heat was inescapable everywhere else, the way I felt dipping my feet in that lake to yank them back when the overfamiliar sunfish came to investigate whether or not they were edible. There is a meaning to that, a singularity, that is impossible to ever truly explain to anyone else. It is the most precious kind of secret, a personal miracle: the kind of doctrine that is carved into one’s very bones. Some missed goodbyes, perhaps, are not goodbyes at all.
—R.