Give me here, this place, anytime

I’m told spring has arrived, however it doesn’t really feel like it. A few days ago a friend opened a side door at my house, lifted her cellular phone, and took a photo. It’s a color photo, but what the eye sees is purely black and white, maybe a little blue and white; snow, a fence alongside my lane, and darkness beneath it all. It’s a lovely image, one difficult to reconcile with the contemporaneous emergence of the daffodils I planted years ago. The seasons run together, non-linear, strange. I have long since stopped paying attention to earnest weather forecasters, though most of them seem pleasant enough.

It is through what passes for winter that acquaintances send notes and photos of warm places, places wherein they have been in retreat for the past few months, an attempt to invoke a jealous response from those who have weathered and shrugged through another cold few months here in the Midwest. I admit to a certain annoyance at the notion that someone might believe I’d rather be where they are. The fact is this: They are wrong. Give me here, now, this place, anytime.

Just above my favorite chair is a photograph of my late wife, one in which she smiles down at me, for hours on end. Today as she watches me, Luna the cat is curled up on my lap, with an open book of poetry by Billy Collins propped against her soft backside while I read, and Nancy LaMott can be heard on a jazz radio station out of Chicago, singing “It Might as Well be Spring.” On a fundamental level it doesn’t get any better than this, however there is an irreparable hollowness that accompanies these moments, one familiar to many, a hollowness I cannot begin to explain, something to do with memory and loss. There is a weariness that comes with these things, a slowing, a time when, like the song, we are “starry eyed, and gravely discontented.”

Lately, birds have been taking to the air in great numbers. On a recent crisp morning, driving along a ridge toward a nearby town, two Great Blue Herons flew in tandem over the road, headed due north, perhaps twenty feet above my windshield, looking for all the world like something out of a “Flintstones” cartoon, long, straight legs trailing, feet pointed south toward whence they came, maybe Central or South America, world travelers that make it look effortless. No long lines, no security checks, and no uncomfortable pat-downs from members of the Transportation Security Administration. Just the occasional, long, languorous flapping of prehistoric wings pushing them ever forward.

I love typos, especially if they belong to others. A new one has entered my vocabulary, one wholly unexpected, and from an unexpected source. I work with a number of editors and a couple of weeks ago one sent me a quick note, apologizing for something he’d failed to do in regard to one of my columns. His first line was priceless, and has now joined the pantheon of miscues I love to invoke: “Aw, carp.” Another favorite of mine is a term used by my wife at a deep point in her Alzheimer’s journey. It’s one I’ve mentioned before. On a warm, sweet summer afternoon I asked her how her day had gone. She turned to me, offered a smile, like the one in her photo, a smile only she could offer, and said, “It was goldfish.” And so it was. It was a phrase I couldn’t have seen coming, but now I appreciate it more than ever. And, as spring awakens, I have a wish for you all: may your coming days be as good as they can be, may they be goldfish.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. His book “The Iowa State Fair” is available from the University of Iowa Press.