Another disturbingly mild but lingering winter appears to be receding. This morning the weather felt right for Easter – sunny, with the tentative warmth of an early spring day. Most of my family is away, at college or taking time off, and only Gabe and I are at home this weekend. I’d intended to spend both days working, but when a client told me in a phone conversation that it will be another ten days or so before he presents the job I’d intended to complete today, I decided that I’d had enough of sitting at my studio worktable this week, and went outside.
I was reminded of another Easter weekend, twenty six years ago, when I found myself suddenly and similarly at loose ends. I was absorbed in my first architecture studio at the University of New Mexico. The design professor said to us at the end of the week that whether we were Christian or not, he thought it was important that we take a couple of days off to acknowledge the rebirth and perennial hope that comes with spring. He suggested that we do something life affirming. At the time, for me that meant throwing together a change of clothes, grabbing friend and fellow classmate Dave Somoza , and impulsively jumping into my car to make a crazy 36 hour drive from Albuquerque to Syracuse for a brief surprise visit – he to pop in on a cousin at Cornell University, and me to see my parents.
This year, with family responsibilities and work deadlines tying me down, taking to the road is out of the question. Feeling wistful for the freedom I had in 1987, I instead carried rake, shovel, and push broom out into the side yard to sweep winter’s debris from the patio and begin uncovering the flower beds around the house. I carefully raked away the layers of dead leaves the gardens had been protected by over the winter, piling them into a wheelbarrow. I trundled load after load around behind the building to the compost heaps by the stone wall next to the alley, trying not to grumble out loud how much I do not like gardening, and how much I’d rather be driving off on a little adventure.
But by the time I got around to the front of the house, I was noticing the daffodils and crocus. Common flowers that are among the first to bloom every spring. I often take them for granted because I usually don’t tend the gardens. Yet uncovering them by hand, remembering the advice of my studio teacher years ago to do something life affirming, I began to appreciate that I was doing exactly that. I started to enjoy it. After I finished as much as I could do in three and a half hours, I put away the tools and came back out with a pair of flower shears. I took seven stalks with full blossoms, came back inside and found a glass vase. A quick study of them sitting on the dining room table in a patch of late afternoon sun became the first entry in a fresh sketchbook. My first non design work related drawing this spring, appropriately of these mundane and lovely flowers, reminds me that it’s good to be alive.
Easter daffodils, 11 x 8, Derwent Inktense pencils