In Brooklyn, flowers are blooming, and trees are beginning to bud. There are cut tulips on my desk and table and petals weighing down the branches outside my windows. Over the past week, there have been several afternoons so beautiful that they’re almost sensual, bordering indecent.
I started noticing this even more after last week’s message, to which my dear friend Clara Bertozzi-Villa, a doctor in the midst of a hectic residency in NYC, replied, “It feels like it's too pretty for how miserable things are.” This feels true to me, in a way that’s both disorienting and extremely welcome. On a rare walk around my neighborhood on Tuesday, I saw trees shooting out small, perfect, tender leaves. As I stood beneath them, I noticed that I had burst into tears, without completely understanding why. Later, I wandered Greenwood Cemetery, and when the wind picked up, magnolia petals tangled in the air like a pink blizzard. I stood as close to the branches as I could, until they were almost brushing my shoulders; I wanted to feel enveloped by them. When I de-masked back at home, a little blush-colored petal fluttered to the floor, a fragile stowaway. “The trees aren't paying attention to the news,” Clara wrote to me. “Bless them.”
Clara suggested this week’s poem. It’s by e. e. cummings, and it reminds me of the exquisite optimism of spring.
In the face of a crisis, optimism can feel both precious and also foolishly, terribly misguided. Of course I want to clutch at something beautiful. But I don’t want to feel lashed like a wind-chewed leaf if things continue to get worse before they get better.
Then again, I often fail to give trees the credit they’re due. I tend to imagine trees—even the wizened, most senior among them—as fragile, prone to rot or disease or to being toppled or splintered in storms. But, young and old, they’re remarkably tough and adaptable. Scientists recently rigged sensors to an 85-foot-tall northern red oak in the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, and they use it as a case study for ways that leafy citizens all over the world respond to the fluctuations of a changing climate. Researchers have seen the tree bulge and shrink each day as it soaks up water and transpires it through the leaves, and they track the rate at which sap journeys through the trunk and branches (more or less sluggishly, depending on water and temperature). The tree behaves differently on sweltering days than it does on cooler ones; it takes cues from the landscape and adapts accordingly. At the moment, beyond harnessing our grief and anger by organizing and throwing money behind causes we want to buoy, that’s the best that any of us can do.
I’ve been soothed by looking at the tree and picturing its future.
This week, I’ve been keen to learn more about the trees I can watch from my window. I have only lived here since the beginning of March, so I’m still getting to know these neighbors. Until now, I’ve only seen them stripped bare—naked for the winter, except for their bark. Over the past few weeks, the buds have swelled, and the remaining seed pods that stuck around from last fall have dropped and rolled away. I’ve done a little reconnaissance, and learned that the tree directly outside my window is a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua). Soon, it will unfurl five-pointed leaves; in the fall, those leaves will turn burgundy; in the winter, the branches will drip with fruit, in the form of little brown, spiky spheres. I’ve been soothed by looking at the tree and picturing its future; I’m rooting for it. If you live in New York City, you can learn about the street trees near you by putting your address into the city’s Street Tree Map. It will give you something to look forward to as we all keep doing our best to adjust.
Thanks for listening—and thanks to the many of you who got in touch last week with poems that moved you. It was a joy to climb around in your brains for a few minutes. Please continue to share the words that are resonating with you. This week, I’m especially curious to know: What work is reminding you that the seasons are marching along without us, even as we’re frozen in place?
Yours,
Jess
P.S. A couple nice nuggets from this week’s internet:
In Walthamstow, in London, someone has been strolling around and scribbling the names of street trees in chalk. The marvelous Sabrina Imbler recently introduced me to r/Seals, which has delivered such joys as this deeply bonkers photo of the teeth of crabeater seals. They look like teeny, ornate pieces of scrimshaw, and I cannot get over it. If you need more poetry morsels to chew on, you’ll be glad to know that Sir Patrick Stewart is reading a sonnet every day and posting a video of it on Twitter. (They are extremely gravelly, marvelously heartfelt, and poorly produced, which just makes them all the more charming.) My friend Emily Moss told me about this wonderful multimedia project, Postcards From Quarantine, by our old classmate, Thalia Gigerenzer. Check out the audio and visual dispatches from quarantines around the world, or submit your own. If you’re feeling a little antsy—or you just love Melville as much as I do—you could help the Nantucket Historical Association transcribe old whaling logs. (And there’s more where that came from: For work, I wrote about many other ways you can help librarians and archivists from home.) In art news, the Met has a beautiful new exhibit of massive, immersive paintings by the artist Gerhard Richter, who wrestles with trauma and the fragmentary nature of memory. The paintings are currently hanging out alone, but there’s a great online guide to wander through. Also, it’s never the wrong time to revisit Jenny Holzer’s theater marquee messages. To quote Sam Sifton, NYT’s bard of the stove: “As they say in the filet mignon trade, nothing wrong with tenderness.”
Talk to you next week. Good luck out there.