Digging In

Crocus Field

“Dig where your tears fall,” Santiago’s heart advises in The Alchemist. I read the book a long time ago but often call upon those words when I’m a bit lost or when the old ways have stopped working or when I find myself at odds with where I am.

Digging where your tears fall is a good place to begin anything: a poem, a garden, a move to distant lands. In these first few glorious, coatless spring days, I’m thinking primarily of joyful tears, leaving the wounded, melancholic ones for other seasons, darker days.

In mid-April, after a winter that shook us like a dog’s tattered toy, my tears are falling into the open mouths of crocuses that skirt the dogwood trees and spread like a deep violet breath across whole back yards. When the crocuses first appear, we know spring is sweeping winter out the door, and our grateful houses, relieved of their massive icicles and frozen roof dams and lost driveways, take in that violet breath and sigh up to the rafters, down into the cellars.

Suddenly the salt-streaked boots, the threadbare mittens, the cumbersome coats, the layered windows, the quilts, wool blankets, stews, soups, and hearty casseroles all seem heavy, weary, wrong. The first day I raise the storm windows, tug down the screens, and fill my furnace-breathing house with sweet air that smells like unborn buds and crumbling earth, I feel like a child again, ready for a bike ride, a romp, a song.

So much seems possible these April days when just a walk without boots and coat is a miracle in itself. I rake oak leaves and burn the dead wood and hang out the sheets and tear into the closets and listen to the rain and think about where my tears are falling now that the morning light drifts across the pillows before six and the birds call through the screens and the dusk stays steady until well after seven.

Maybe a poem. Maybe a new dress. Maybe a love story. Maybe a big pot of pansies. Maybe a whole dinner of asparagus. Maybe a rollicking house-hooshing, moving the furniture, taking up the rugs, finding lost buttons and cracker crumbs and fireplace ash and settled dust and memories of a winter all past and gone.

My tears fall into that.