Entry 6: Carpe diem

17 March 2017, early afternoon
Low forties, overcast, slight breeze

The ground is a muddy, soppy crumble of eager green grass and patches of spring snow. This week's promised blizzard, up to six inches, ended up only a skirt of snow, and now most of it has melted into the saturated earth. I wander carefully up the hill in Mellon Park, testing the feel of the ground beneath my poorly-treaded boots. Sitting down on the hill's crest, like I usually do, isn't an option, unless I want soaked jeans, and I imagine even the wood chips surrounding the park's trees are soggy and damp. So I meander west, spotting a vacant bench above an asphalt path.

"Nanette L. Gordon," the bench's plaque reads, "Raised her family in this park 1928-2016."

I sit down on Nanette's bench, wondering how much this place has changed since 1928. The hill sloping down to the path is the same muddy turf as the rest of the park, but here draping green fingers of daffodils spear up through the tufted grass and rounded blankets of wet snow. Closer to the path, pockets of slumping, bright yellow flowers glow against the gray afternoon. I'm reminded of glacier lilies back in Montana, spring's first flowers popping bright yellow against snowfields trickling sweet meltwater through gravelly soils of granite, quartz, and fool's gold. For fear of giardia, I never drink straight from mountain streams except for places like these—clear, sharp rivulets of the purest tasting water I've ever had, shared by blooming glacier lilies. Soon shooting stars join them, and yellow bells, and buttercups, flares of color against a landscape still dominated by winter's white.

I've been thinking a lot about risk lately, in writing and in life, and these hunched but verdant daffodils remind me of that sharp-edged contemplation. In forth and fifth grade my teacher taught us the phrase Carpe diem, "seize the day" in Latin, and those words have stuck with me ever since, a foundation of thought before yolo ever worked its way into modern lexicon. Carpe diem, I think, staring at the daffodils still edged against snow, risking their paper-thin petals against ripping wind and starry-skied frost for the chance to bloom first, to stretch pale roots into sodden earth among knifes of ice. So why not stretch green leaves through snow to shine sharp yellow against that snow?

I know that this gust of cold, snowy weather across the eastern United States has frozen fruit trees' buds, cutting out a season's crops even before the season began. Anthropogenic climate change means spring is inching ever closer to the new year for many parts of the world, but unpredictable weather means these cold systems still bluster through and shred flower buds and crops. Now carpe diem is each day, every day seized by an unpredictability, a snowball of conditions we cannot control but somehow still catalyze.

Daffodils in Pittsburgh, snowfields in Montana, all suddenly immediate and terrifying. Glacier lilies, as their name alludes, prefer glaciers as well as snowfields, and glaciers in places like Glacier National Park are expected to disappear by 2030, and those in the Beartooth Mountains and elsewhere in the state likely not much longer. Pittsburgh, I've found, is on the fringe of north and south, sixty-five in January and then back in the teens two weeks later, a wild mismatch of data points on a graph. The daffodils, too, are on the fringe of snow, of winter, of a white unpredictability borne from a known yet still debated and doubted source.

I'd like to live like the daffodils, like glacier lilies and shooting stars and trees blooming in spite of it all. Dig in my feet to mud and grit and sopping snow and yell bright yellow into the tumultuous air, that here we are, cold and bright, stooped but growing, windblown and seizing every moment for its sunshine and sweet, clear rain.

Entry 5: Listening

28 February 2017, evening/dusk
Mid-fifties, overcast, slight breeze

Pittsburgh's overcast sky and fade of cloud-clutched sunlight has given the air a screen of flatness, that quality of dusk where everything is visible but nothing defined. I could stare at the billows and cuts in the clouds above, or get down on my stomach, press my chin to the grass, and watch each individual blade tremble with wind. But today I feel like listening.

I close my eyes. The sound of cars barreling past on Fifth Avenue overwhelms until I let that noise settle out: the swish of tires on asphalt and through unstable air, broken by an occasional clip as a car catches a crack or manhole on the street. I usually think of cars as loud chunks of metal, but they hardly sound metallic at all, more a smooth hum of spinning rubber. Behind me, I pick up the second dominant sound in Mellon Park: the robins. Despite a Sibley's guide to eastern birds sitting in my bedside bookcase back at my apartment, I'm still a foreigner to most of the birds here—but the robins I recognize. They trill and cheep; I think of Mary Oliver and imagine their small pink tongues in their yellow-beaked mouths. Surely they know what they're saying.

To my right, a soft jingle of dog tags, and the joyous screech of children in the playground across Fifth. Sirens flare distantly in Homewood, and then a helicopter joins them from above, rumbling from the southeast to the southwest. Its blades chop the air, echoing a deep-throated whir like someone rolling their R's.

Something scampers in the tree above me, and I catch myself before I can open my eyes to look. It could be a squirrel, or larger bird, but no one in any particular hurry to scurry. It scuttles, pauses, and there's a tentative grind of teeth to acorn. Cracking open my eyes to jot these details down on the page, I noticed minute dabs of rain on my paper, and now I feel them, soft pins of water subtle on my skin.

Tssskkkssskkksskkk. Behind me, two bodies of sharp claws scuffle around the rough bark of a conifer, then bound away through soft mulch. Once in a while, the rubber-lined swish of cars on Fifth breaks into the deep grind of a rising engine. Shift into fourth, I think automatically (or manually?), as the vibration hums into the park's hill and settles against my ankles.

The robins continue their songs, and they sound so much like home. Not home as a place, or a period of time, but just that sound of welcome. I lean in on the differences of their calls—some light and looping in well-versed announcements, others sharp in declarations of charisma. There's an urgency in some chirps, a confrontation voiced by the deep-breasted birds singing their strengths into the gray dusk.

The wind doesn't seem to blow anymore, but rather sighs. Dead leaves and blades of grass shuffle slightly in the breeze, and I can hear the earth clicking, faint but tight ticks present even over the rush of traffic. Earthworms, I imagine, wriggling through humus and sharp grains of minerals. Or perhaps the earth always clicks and shifts, and I'm just too visually-bound to perceive it, too overwhelmed by the bold sounds of the world to appreciate the constant ones.

I am learning to love the constant ones.