Sawmill Closes, Trees Bloom

Left early today to get to school early to finish putting in my grades for the 3rd quarter.  The time I should have gained was lost due to a vehicle fire on the Sawmill.  The parkway was closed at exit 27; we were routed onto the local roads in Thornwood where we wended our way along Route 117, through Pleasantville, left on Route 120 to Chappaqua. 

It's spring.  The broken trees, many of them splintered through their hulking trunks, lay with their skirts on the ground bursting with greenery.  All along the hills, tufts of green dress bare winter skeletons of trees -- or "sculpture without their leaves" as Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast. 

Coming down Broadway the meridian is abloom making small parks between lanes of traffic rushing north and south.  Suddenly, it's pleasant in the middle of Broadway to sit in the sun on a park bench, pastel tulips opening, pink trees flowering.

Yesterday we (my dog and I) walked across the park to the Central Park Conservancy at Fifth Avenue and 105th (about a 20 minute walk.)  There it was an olafactory feast.  The crab apple trees which line two parallel paths, were abloom with their pinky white flowers that smell like nothing else.  The lilac trees were in bloom.  The wisteria.  I go there to breathe in the smells. 

There was a crab apple tree in our back yard in Birmingham, Michigan that bloomed every year on my daughter's birthday, the smell so sweet you could cry.  There is a picture of Sari when she was 5 standing by the crab apple tree holding a branch of the tree.  She is wearing a blue dress that she loved and refused to let me pass down to her younger sister, so I framed that dress with the picture mounted on the dress (something I'd seen on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art).  So when I pass a crab apple tree in bloom, I always reach for a branch and bring it to my nose to sniff the smell of my daughter's youth.

Wisteria bloomed in purple bunches like grapes on an arbor along the side of my grandmother's garage on 7 Mile Road in Detroit.  Cars would stop and people would ask if they could photograph the side of her garage in full bloom.  I need to smell the wisteria, its sour-sweet scent -- and I am again with my grandmother at the side of her house, the cars whizzing by, warm lace cookies waiting inside.