Testing Clover

Tuesday comes wrapped in Nobody Owen's grey winding sheet, damp and slightly chilly this morning. This makes for a commute of adjusting wiper blade speeds to deal with endless variations of mist to sprinkles. As uncertain as Tuesday's role in the work week, the rain today is more mild irritant than significant impression.

Folks are tired of the rain and grey skies this far into June. I can tell by the impatience of their driving this morning. Pressing into each other, tailgating, cutting corners, pushing, pushing. Trying, I imagine, to force their wills onto the landscape of the morning commute, to exercise control over something, anything.

For whatever reason, I can't be bothered to get caught up in that this morning. I feel like I'm simply slipping alongside the morning rush. I am the small twig floating inconsequentially past canoes on the river. My commute is short, though, so it is easy to sustain this illusion. Much more time spent in this coursing stream of collective frustration and I, too, would undoubtedly catch the communicable rancor of the morning commute.

I pull into the sleeping campus no worse for the wear. The quarter break is upon us, and the campus does rest. The parking lots are largely empty, there are no early morning clusters of students moving toward early classes, and the whole place feels quietly different. A college campus should throng and buzz with activity, but these occasional quiet spaces in the annual calendar do have a serene beauty of their own.

Walking across campus yesterday I came across a clump of purple clover in full bloom. Instantly, I was back in my youth, walking in a field on a warm summer day, plucking clover heads to suck the sweet drops of nectar from the base of their flower spikes. I wanted, so badly in that moment, to bend down and pluck a few spikes and test for nectar. Being grown up, though, I also thought about passing animals, th habits of people, airborne pollution, and gardening chemicals (though we do practice sustainable horticulture on campus, so the latter was probably not a real concern), and I resisted. I resisted tasting the clover blossoms, but I did pause long enough to snap a picture:



Like Whittier's musings in his poem The Barefoot Boy:

Oh for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,
Of the wild-flower’s time and place...

And

Oh for boyhood’s time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon,
When all things I heard or saw,
Me, their master, waited for.
I was rich in flowers and trees,
Humming-birds and honey-bees;

All this swept over me in a flash, before and after I took the adult course of inaction. If I pass that clover again today, and I believe I will, I intend to follow the barefoot boy's free-spirited course of action this time. Maybe they won't taste as sweet as memory, but at least I will know.

Tuesday can keep her grey winding sheet, June her clouds and rain, and the morning commute her seething frustration. Sometimes you have to step outside of time for the briefest of moments (if that isn't a contradiction) and test the clover.

Today's soundtrack (all from the new Sigur Rós album Valtari:
- Remembihnútur
- Dauõalogn
- Varõeldur

- Posted via Hermes.