September 6, 2012

The familiar can seem strange at times when seen from outside usual perceptions.  The trees this morning are lit up, the smooth bark of the crepe myrtles seems to multiply in the shifting of the sun to another angle, swinging around to light up the yard more brilliantly, and earlier.   Their leaves are starting the fall turn, the earliest ones, small gold coins littering the patio, dropping at every breath of wind, mingled with the last of their curly flowers, an occasional spear of pink or white not yet ready to let go.   A huge gray jay, oddly painted only the barest blue, takes a dip in the water bowl, even though the water is obscured by fallen leaves.  Grass on the verge of the road is smooth this morning, a yellow-green carpet after the mowers came yesterday.  Overhead the blue is blank as an unwritten page, spread out to infinity, though you know behind it the black of space looms forever above the fragile shell of air we depend on.

Sometimes talking to people in various parts of the world, you come upon things ordinary to them that are strange to you, and you surprise them too.  Like Texas two-time zones big, seems obscene to people from much smaller countries, and having such heat as we have in the summer can seem outrageous to people who must battle rain and cold a lot more often than we do.  The idea of it being 45 degrees for a summer night . . . well, that's just seems much too cold for us, or dealing snow on a regular basis,  a constant bitter cold all winter, or even people living through July without air conditioning, which doesn't bear thinking about here.  I found a poem from Poetry  magazine this month by Billy Collins, and I recognized the feeling, only in reverse, thinking about places like he might have come from, all those cold climates.

Report from the Subtropics

For one thing, there’s no more snow
to watch from an evening window,
and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house
so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,

and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman
for her early dinner of wood.

No hexagrams of frost to study carefully
on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.

And there’s no black sweater to pull over my head
while I wait for the coffee to brew.

Instead, I walk around in children’s clothes—
shorts and a T-shirt with the name of a band
lettered on the front, announcing me to nobody.

The sun never fails to arrive early
and refuses to leave the party
even after I go from room to room,
turning out all the lights, and making a face.

And the birds with those long white necks?
All they do is swivel their heads
to look at me as I walk past
as if they all knew my password
and the name of the city where I was born.

Billy Collins

Here in the subtropics, we do not have frost hexagrams on the bathroom window, but geckos seeking a dinner of moths attracted to the light, and the hum of the air conditioner, in our case a very loud hum, accompanies the morning coffee, and I am the only one to want a shawl, or a sweater, every one else groans at seeing me covered up against its cool draft.  And egrets are so common here, several kinds of them, that to think of them absent in other climates just seems strange, that those must be the same people who have never seen the ocean, or who would think the rabid growth of green we have is unsettling.  I'm glad of the chance to see our everyday by the light of someone else's sun, new eyes for old, a phrase that has new meaning to me, and not just for experiencing the familiar from a colder viewpoint!