Sometimes, as the sun sets on the Hudson and a calm pink glow extends over the expanse of Manhattan spread out before my living room window, I look out over the city and think of Reverend Eli Jenkins in Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood" as he throws open his windows each morning, and in his lovely welsh lilt, issues a blessing on his adopted town.
By Golden Grove 'neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer
To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.
Other times - when its a really good day - I think about Walt Whitman's poem Miracles
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
But there are other days....... when, despite twenty years of practice that allow me to say with certainty that I could sleep in the middle of a six lane highway, the honking of those friday night commuters - all too eager to flee down the The Midtown Tunnel to Long Island - becomes unbearable. Days when the cold hearted canyons and towers of the Wall Street Downtown District glower on the skyline like ostentatious cemetery sepulchers in praise of mammon. Then I yearn for the incomparable greenness of Cheshire, for the blue expanse of the Cheshire plain, for the stonewalls crisscrossing the hills and the view of The Cloud - the last outcrop of the Pennine chain.
I come to these thoughts again because The Long-Suffering Husband has lately voiced a similar yearning - but for a different place. A cabin on a remote lake in the Upper Pennisua of Michigan, one that once belonged to his parents, recently came up for sale. He expressed his desire to buy it, and, as I well understand this yearning, I foolishly said "Go ahead". After our recent pleasant dalliances in breezy Newport and a pleasant balmy stay in the civility of Charleston I imagined we had finally put behind us all those sweaty holidays on mosquito ridden lakes. But now the bugs have literally come back to bite me. Of course there is no logic to this decision. We live two days drive or an eight hour flight away and so until we retire could spend less than three weeks a year there at most. But all diaspora hanker for a precious toe-hold in their past and, in these matters, the heart must have its way. On the bright side there are wolves up there - five hundred and four of them in the last count - so perhaps, when it snows and the bugs have gone it too will be full of natures miracles.
