We recently returned to Montreal after a week in central New York. In Montreal, there was a terrible ice storm last Wednesday, with power outages that lasted days for many people, and devastating damage to the city's trees, especially in the parks. Friends sent us pictures and their own accounts, and while our building was without power for a long time, and then again last night, we clearly missed the worst of it. I also missed the observations of Holy Week at the cathedral for the first time in years, but we got back in time for Easter. Renewal, warmth, color, and sunlight are exactly what everyone needs -- myself included.
300 miles to the south, spring was already in the process of arriving, and on our last evening there, I got out my watercolors and painted this field that we had seen a few hours earlier in the late afternoon light. The luminous gold only lasted for a few minutes on this cut cornfield and the hill beyond, but it was breathtaking enough that I had cried "Stop the car!" and rushed out into the muddy road with my camera.
It did me a huge amount of good to be out in the countryside for a while after this long urban winter. We saw a nesting bald eagle, a flock of mergansers on the recently-unfrozen lake; rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and wild turkeys; Canada geese, herons, robins, cardinals, and dark-eyed juncos...and someone -- maybe our weasel -- had generously left its scat on our front porch, full of hair and tiny bones. The stiff, bright green and purple noses of skunk cabbage had already poked through the water in the swamp, and spring peepers sang in full chorus even during daylight hours. No leaves showed on any trees or shrubs yet, just on one honeysuckle that faced the southern light, but there were pussy willows in the swamp, one of my mother's yellow crocuses was in bloom, and the woods felt tremulous, as if you could actually feel the pent-up power of all those tightly-furled leaves inside the millions of buds, ready to burst forth.
At the same time, I've been finishing my series of winter snowscapes in charcoal. There was still a lot of snow in the Adirondacks, and I was able to take reference pictures for a few more drawings, and stay within that much colder frame of mind while I was working on them. I'm also beginning an essay to accompany this series of drawings, about the central New York landscape and why it is under my skin. But I can feel my heart gravitating toward color and light, and coming back home to Easter only reinforced that sense of new beginnings, and new life.
We attended the Great Vigil of Easter at the cathedral on Saturday night. It begins with a fire in the courtyard, which is then carried into the dark church via the lighted Pascal candle, from which everyone's small tapers are lit, and we sit together in that near-darkness while the foundational stories of the Hebrew scriptures are read and music is sung; finally the dry bones of Ezekiel are brought to life, and we move to the resurrection story, the organ peals forth, bells ring, the lights go on and the candles are extinguished, and we find ourselves in a church bedecked with flowers and spring color. Pagan in some ways; ironic in a city ravaged by an ice storm, with so many families still in darkness and cold -- and utterly welcome to my own tired spirit.
My other cathedral this year was this circle of hemlock trees on a small ridge near the lake. I had gone there on Good Friday morning, climbing up onto the ridge to stand under the trees, listening to the wind, the invisible amphibious chorus, the calls of nesting geese on the pond beyond, and let the peace of that place, along with many memories, permeate my body and heart.
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