Green again

A river rock notices spring.

It’s spring, which is nice. I’ve sweet peas already blooming from volunteer plants. I could feel a sense of impending doom about the long hot fiery summer this early spring promises. But instead, I am enjoying the sunshine and the flowers as well as the other spring delights of Spokane, Washington.

What are those? you might well ask. Well, I have been compiling a list particular to Spokane, but I assume you could find the delights of spring where you live just as easily. I hope you take the time to name these pleasures.

I live on a college campus surrounded by single family homes. I can chart a history of trends through the trees planted in the neighborhood. Spring is the time to notice the generations of trees and wonder at the folks who planted them.

The oldest trees in the neighborhood are the ponderosa pines which were here before the houses. In some cases, houses were built around them. Elderly, tall, cinnamon barked, but very few. Then you can tell that the black locust enjoyed a moment way back when, as did sycamores and then lindens and some now huge maples. Double pink cherries and even a magnolia or two were planted in the past twenty years as the climate has warmed.

A man of my own time, I recently planted a very small native oak this spring. Fifty years from now, someone can look at that tree and know there was a trend to plant native trees rather than colorful ornamentals or well behaved street trees. The Black Oak being neither.

For now, the street tree maple outside my window is a fresh spring green. I could worry about it being covered with mildew as happened last year after a stretch of hot weather in May. Or I could enjoy the green for now.

It being spring, the university choir concert has been given and appreciated. Somberly dressed young people filed on stage and sang through musical literature from several centuries and we applauded like we did last year and will do so again next. It’s the spring concert and all is as it should be. Little has changed since I was a member of the same choir forty two years ago. And why should it? no one goes to a college choir concert in search of novelty.

And last weekend, forty thousand folks gathered downtown and ran the annual 12k called Bloomsday in honor of the lilacs which are also in full glory this time of year. I went to the starting lines just to be part of the crowd enjoying the excitement of the day and the concentrated mass of humans being human. Which I loved.

Living on a college campus is like being a rock in a river. The students and faculty rush through like water, the staff shows up like fish every day, but we Jesuits are part of the river bed, having been here since before the school began. It seems as though we are constantly welcoming or sending off another set of students and we remain.

I will participate in the commencement ceremonies and then return to my community residence and pick rhubarb. And I will say good bye to dozens of students, wishing them well as they begin lives of work, further study or uncertainty and I will be back at my desk writing the next morning as the sun rises earlier and earlier and spring turns to summer.