Happy Earth Day

It’s been a brief but remarkable string of days. Why? Because the leaves are coming out. Young, bright, and translucent, they glow in the sun. Add to that a gentle breeze, with the temperature hitting that cool, comfortable mid-range, and it makes you want to shout.

Hilary and I drove down to Eloise Butler yesterday at 7:30. No one was there to open the gate, so we took a stroll through the woods, peering down at the ponds and swamps below, then crossed the parkway to the quaking bog. We chatted with a couple of birders, one of whom gave us a tip as to the location of a great-horned owl nest. We couldn’t find it, but little matter.

As the day heated up, we washed the windows, shedding our coats and swapping stocking caps for baseball caps. Later I removed the leaves from the garden. (Is it too early, or too late? I don’t know.) I couldn’t identify some of the plants at first, though they’ve been there for years. Ah, yes. Siberian bugloss, and ligularia. And our pulmonaria is boasting a single pink flower!

Further back in the woods I spotted some white trout-lilies that have been coming up every spring for more than forty years.

As if on cue, the mail carrier came by with “In the Garden,” a twenty-page pamphlet that Steve Kelley has been publishing every spring for I don’t know how long. I enjoyed working with Steve and his wife, Arla, a few years ago, on a collection of essays describing their many years at the helm of Kelley & Kelley Nursery out in Long Lake.

Nodin Press published that book. And as it happens, Earth Day is also Norton Stillman’s birthday. We took Norton out to dinner last week, less as a birthday celebration that as a thank-you for giving me the pleasure of working with him almost daily for the last few decades. We do it every year.

We took him to Vinae, where we ate peppery cucumber salad, creamy boiled cabbage, eggplant puree with purple sticky-rice, and other exotic stuff. The place was hopping. It was fun.

Earth Day is also Eddy Albert’s birthday. You probably know him as the star of Green Acres, a silly comedy that had little to do with environmental issues, I think, though the title is suggestive. But he was also an early, and a staunch, environmentalist. Albert went to Central High School in Minneapolis and the U of MN. (He studied economics.) The fact that Earth Day takes place on his birthday is no coincidence.

Norton is a bit of an environmentalist himself, though I think his greatest contribution along those lines is as the publisher of many fine books related to the outdoors. These include essay collections by Jim Gilbert, Matt Schuth, Steve Kelley, and others; and works of poetry too numerous to name, nearly all of which draw sustenance from the out-of-doors in one way or another.  

But on a day like today, a stroll through the back yard or even a simple glance out the window is as stunning as any poem. The cherry orchard is coming along nicely, there’s a robin in the birdbath, the air is cool, the cardinals are twittering, the sky is blue. And the clouds are white.