The evening of my arrival in the Hampton Roads locale was spent at the ancestral home of the event's host. The group was led in and through the house, to a wooden deck out back. A pair of copses were bookends to a bank of water, turquoise at dusk, whose proper name was of some very exacting concern.
"Every time you say 'swamp,'" chuckled our host, "my father's property drops by a hundred dollars." He preferred "wetlands," although my indirect professional experience with that word has been one of regulatory estoppel caused by the sighting of rare and spotted animals. Marsh? Too rough, whatever charm one finds searching for bullfrogs among the cattails. Lagoon? Not after its association with unneighborly webbed creatures that might emerge from beneath. Bayou is a smooth word for sales, if only it didn't invite corrections on finer points of geography and limnology. Whatever the landscape means to science, it was quite a view.
I haven't watched this year's greening as intently as I might, having witnessed a full bloom — south of the nation's capital, spring was already a few weeks old. That I would pay no subsequent attention to the weather is unlikely, what with the sky so opportunely bumptious.
With the main event of my trip to southeast Virginia on Saturday, I spent Friday visiting local attractions. My friend Ed and I began with the USS Wisconsin.
I spent the last five days in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, enjoying the happy company of good people.
Photographs were taken; photographs shall be shared.
Like the New Yorker who doesn't think to buy tickets for Broadway, I have not gone to the Lake Erie shoreline in about five years. I wouldn't have been there today, either, if not for a visiting Virginian who, learning that Huntington Beach was fifteen minutes away, promised lunch in exchange for his first look at a Great Lake. Halfway to our destination, I thought of cloudless sky, cerulescent water, mahogany buds and the camera inside my satchel.
As the lengthening of the day pushes sunrise to a point before any reasonable hour, I have a choice between waking earlier or managing the coincidence of light and color fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour later. Variety and rest are thereby served.
Sitting nearby is, for them, sometimes enough.
The chaplain of Syracuse University's Newman Association — as my father tells it — used to shake his head when students, anxious to shed heavy coats and slip on jackets, would pronounce spring attendant. "One more big storm left," Father would warn his flock. And the snow would sweep down and in.
Nearly forty years later, here, by the grace of God and the arctic: Easter squalls. Apropos, thunder crashed just now.
Thermometry balances later this week with the arrival of snow, so summery have the last few days been. Sunlit evenings can encourage any activity, but at the end of winter they are understood as a privilege. After a dinner hour spent reading, and listening to spring sounds through the apartment's narrowly open balcony door, I went for a walk.
April is here, nature having obliged the calendar. Tree frogs are chirping; cardinals are singing; and buds are swelling, the precocious ones already burst. There was only one concern tonight: what to do with the time.
Monday evening would have been warm no matter which number the little hand of clocks across northern Ohio were pointing to. The hour in question was one later than usual because of daylight saving, and an erubescent cloud formation slid to the east at seven twenty-six instead of six twenty-six, when the photographer might have been elsewhere. From Washington has come a purely discretionary statute that is — just this once? — due thanks.
