moments from today

in the course of an ordinary sort of day - there seems to be so many stories...
and here is one

just as it is - now - the old pear tree is blooming white clusters - mottled with sun, and shadow ... the wind is cold and blossoms cling to the haggared branchlets ... it was like that - the sun and the clouds and the cold wind ... walking down by the populars - you can smell the resin - do you know that smell? pungent and sweet it is carried on the air - more so on warmer days - but even on this cool one ... there is the witness of that sense of smell ... how remarkable that is ... anyway - the populars are budding out - the tender leaflets are greeny-golden ... and as they grow out toward the warming days - the resinous sheaths that protected them as they were buds fall away ... they are the source of the aroma of the populars... that resin... sticky and pungent - it absorbs into your skin when you touch it... in some other age and in some other place - they would make oil infusions with this kind of resin - and they would call it Balm of Gilead ... and here on the pacific coast in some other time - the natives would mix it with animal fat and use it on their skin for aches ...
these few days - when the scent of popular is on the air it is the time to collect the sheaths ... and i knelt down in the wet ground - grass still short - and the leaves from fall still decaying ... and there is the patch of wild strawberries i see every year - but by the time the berries are ripe, the grass is long and the brambles have wound their way through the chaos of the wild ground so it takes a long time to find them... but today - it is the resin i want. from the tiny sheaths that have fallen to the ground - i pick them up, one by one... plucking them out of the blades of grass and last year's leaves while the little black spiders skitter around... soaked knees - cold but not minding... fingers get numb from the wind and very sticky - with layers of resin building up on them ... like the way pollen clings to the legs of bees in June... then standing and so very carefully twisting off the sheaths from around the leaflets - leaving them intact to grow green in summer sun then age to golden yellow - as if they had captured the essence of the sun only to fall to the ground to rot brown .... home for spiders and food for the tiny creatures that live despite my ignorance of them...