(Howell Creek Radio address for March 24, 2012, by Joel Dueck -- http://howellcreekradio.com) # Dirt and Leaf Our backyard is small, very small, and it faces directly onto what is kind of a busy road. There were some lilac bushes between the yard and the road at one time, but they were scraped away when the excavators put in the final grade this last autumn, and they were weedy and scrubby anyway. In one corner there's this ruinous rubble of brick, mostly covered in leaves and branches, that might have to go at some point. I'm not so sure though. The suburban householder tends to think by default in terms of cleaning out every corner of the yard, scouring and scrubbing it bright and removing every trace of natural untidiness, and I'm not so sure that I want to go that route -- at least not until I have something to replace it with that appeals to the imagination at least as much as the mysterious old heap of bricks does. In a way, the ugly pile of bricks is the most interesting thing about our little back yard. * * * In the 1800s there lived in England, a young man named Gerard Manley Hopkins. Listen to these excerpts from his journal: > Ap. 27, 1868. Generally fine between hard showers; some hail, which made the evening very cold, a flash of lightening, a clap of thunder, and a bright rainbow; somne grey cloud between showers ribbed and draped and some wild bright big brown flix at the border of a great rack with blue rising behind... > > May 4. Dull; then fine; cold, esp. in wind -- Note the elm here on one side of beautiful build with great limb overhanging the sunk fence into the Park and headed like the one near the house at Shanklin but when seen fr. the opposite side to this the limb uninteresting or clumsy. > > July 9. Before sunrise looking out of the window saw a noble scape of stars...Sunrise we saw well: the north landscape was blighty but the south, the important one, with the Alps, clear; lower down all was mist and flue of white cloud, wh. grew thicker as the day went on and like a junket lay scattered on the lakes. The sun lit up the bright acres of the snows at first with pink but afterwards clear white.... In going down betw. Pilatus and a long streak of cloud the blue sky was greenish. Since [then] I have found this colour is seen in looking fr. the snow to the sky but why I do not understand: can there possibly be a rose hue supressed in the white? These are taken utterly at random; the whole thing reads like this, like the journal of a painter, littered with observations of the forms of particular trees and clouds, and exquisite colors at different times of the day and night. You would think from this that Hopkins was a painter, but as it turns out, he was a poet. Reading these journal entries, I can't help thinking that either the world was a younger, brighter place in those days, and that the air and the light have all changed for the drabber; *or* maybe the Nature painted the same way then that she does now, and Hopkins, like Sherlock Holmes, "saw it because he expected to see it." Here is an excerpt from the diary of C.S. Lewis. > Thursday, 15 June 1922. A free day, at last. I went out walking at 10 o'clock. It was the most delightful, cool grey skied summer day. I went up Shotover and down the other side to Wheatley, thence to my right over the railway bridge and up past the old windmill where I once went with Jenkin on bicycles. I was in capital form, getting "thrills" from everything, full of unspecified moemories, and, for some time, almost free from thought. I read things like this with a certain amount of chagrin, because there are no railway bridges or old windmills where I live. I read things like this with a certain amount of disappointment in my American urban and suburban surroundings, and an almost grouchy ache for any sizeable amount of place that has more dirt and leaf and stone about it than anything else. > The water for which we may have to look In summertime with a witching-wand, In every wheelrut's now a brook, In every print of hoof a pond. Be glad of water, but don't forget The lurking frost in the earth beneath That will steal forth after the sun is set And show on the water its crystal teeth. > The time when most I loved my task These two must make me love it more By coming with what they came to ask. You'd think I never had felt before The weight of an axe-head poised aloft, The grip on earth of outspread feet, The life of muscles rocking soft And smooth and moist in vernal heat. > -- Robert Frost, _Two Tramps in Mud Time_ * * * Synopsis: ----------- After the sudden and early thaw, thoughts turn to yard maintenance which does not necessarily include scouring away every trace of unnatural untidiness.