Night on Earth

I’m driving down the road in New Jersey—my mother-in-law at the wheel, kids in the backseat—when I get a message that a musician I know has been jailed and tortured for speaking out against his government. He’s been sentenced to three years. Meanwhile, magnolias are bursting on suburban streets. In the car, John Lennon is singing, nothing’s gonna change my world.

The next day, we go to the No Kings protest in Brookdale Park. People wave their signs and shout, against ICE, against genocide, against the government. Afterward, we head to the playground, sun on our faces, and I think of my friend in his jail cell. I remember him playing his komuz, drawing sound from the three strings like pulling marrow from bone. He played with a wildness matched by his eccentric humor. We called him Crazy Cat.

When I get back Upstate, daffodils are coming up everywhere. These flowers do not discriminate. They appear in clumps in our yard, but also in front of the hoarder junk-heap down the road, the one with the “warning: does not play well with liberals” sign out front. They come up at the edge of the marsh, next to the carnage of cottonwoods where the beaver has been making his dam. This place deserves beauty too, the daffodils seem to say, opening their sun-bright mouths. Everyone deserves a reprieve from the terrors of this world.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about time. Maybe it’s watching my father slowly fade to dementia. Maybe it’s watching the baby have his first experience with touching the grass. It all feels load-bearing. Like I’m holding the beginning of the rope and the end of the rope, and sometimes I can’t tell which side is which.

I am trying to grasp the texture of Time: slippery, moon-silver, appearing and disappearing like the vernal pools that fill the woods. I am standing in the center of this moment—a moment my boys are not old enough to remember, a moment my father is not young enough to remember—and I am remembering all of it. The first snowdrops. The last snowmelt. The beautiful and the terrible, the light and the dim, the things that have decomposed and the things that are growing within it.

In the marsh down the road, the herons have returned to their nests. We think of birds’ nests as these delicate, immaculate things, but these ones are huge and clumsy. They appear haphazard, a slapdash of black sticks, and yet these structures are shelters. They tower above the wetlands, nestled in the crooks of dead trees, and here in this dark, sodden mess, life begins.

Just before our trip to New Jersey, we painted our downstairs bathroom. I hated this room before. It felt sad and barren as a cell. Now it is an ante-chamber into another world. The paint we used is a deep olive green called Night on Earth. There’s something about this color that feels like the manifestation of Time itself. Like moss or algae. Like a vernal pool.

Crazy Cat, I am sending you this green. These daffodils, these nests. This spring. I want you to see that another world is possible. I want to tell you that it will not last forever.