New natural gas lines arrive in my old Louisiana district, and the advanced teams were occupied this spring when they sort where everything should go. The survey teams painted the streets last month, placing tiny flags in our courses to mark water pipes and other public services so that they can be avoided when the excavation begins.
Meanwhile, we, the owners, had our own nodes to detach themselves.
We all do our best to cut the first grass of the season while dodging these small issues that dot our lawns. I was struck by the speed with which our eyes adapt to accept new parts of our daily landscape. These miniature flags, bright orange, green and yellow, now seem to me as much an essential as the Azaleas with their April flowers or the purple petals of the Japanese Magnolia, cuts like votive candles while they claim in the sun.
All this digging in my little corner of the city pushed me to think of the twin life of my neighborhood – the one I see above the ground every day, in the winding sidewalks and giant oaks, and the calm world which trembles below, among clay and verses and tiny bulbs and seeds doing their secret work.
Inevitably, it brings my thoughts to Foster, our faithful burrow, disappeared a few years now but rarely far from the mind. If you have already had a burrow, you will know that they kiss this double view of life above and below the ground all the time.
Like most other burrows, Foster liked to dig – so much so that he stirred deep under the covers once he had spoken in the beds of our children.
Foster’s zeal for excavation made my walks with him an adventure.
We walk along the sidewalk, taking the song of the birds and the sun, when its nostrils would escape and its body stood, like a fishing line tight by a captive perch. Then, the furious excavation would begin, the dirt and the flying grass as it threw clods of earth from its tiny legs.
I assumed that he had sniffed a mole and was hunting. What worried me, however, is the problem he was vandalizing a neighbor’s lawn. I pulled on the leash and pressed it, but it was a hard slog for me and this fierce little Mutt. He was a predator fascinated by his prey, not easily moved by his dreams lived in conquest.
I now walk alone these days while I am setting off along the familiar blocks – a ritual that moved me, as Easter arrives, to dwell on a permanent miracle. The wonders of the season – the wrapped wooden and the dragging jasmine, the salamanders in the sun on my front porch – have resurrected from the cold and black floor under our feet.
It was a comfort in this year worried to think that life finds a way to go into darkness.
Correction: last week’s chronicle included the bad name for the magazine that Graydon Carter has published in recent years of his career. It is the most famous for the Vanity Fair edition.
Send an email to Danny Heitman to danny@dannyheitman.com.