Easter Weekend

Easter weekend passed sunny but cold in the northeast. As if to taunt me with the possibility of a move to a subtropical zone, Astoria was a riot of springtime color on lawns, on stoops and on hat brims. In the business district, florists put out pots of pert tulips, fragrant hyacinth, ladylike tea roses, all ready to be presented with a bow and an Easter card and to be received with a smile. Back home, the hollyhock bush of years' worth of mentions from my writer's window has finally been pruned and the azaleas, game but weary, that lined the courtyard beneath it have been removed and laid to a well-earned rest. In their place, buoyant daffodils have been given residence, and this spring the yard is sprinkled with the jewel-like glitter of grape hyacinth and violets. From my new writer's window in the refurbished office, sleek green ivy grips the back walls of the building with its protective embrace, as the screens on the open windows are scratched by the joyous yellow arms of a forsythia being rustled by spring breezes. A poetic imagination might extrapolate that the plants are knocking to come inside, but -- to my mind even more poetically -- they are simply affirming that they are there.

I spent my first weekend back east unpacking from a winter's worth of trips west. Anyone who knows me will confirm they would never have thought they would witness me spending so much time on airplanes. But while our west coast urban home is a fact, it felt good to take this weekend to reconnect with our original urban home in New York City. Family and friends had been good about stopping by to water plants, but this weekend I spent time with each of these important members of the family, removing dead growth, refreshing top soil and yes, talking with them. Plants are living beings, and respond to care with sharing their living green energy with the household. A home full of happy plants is peaceful, and as they share intimate bond with the profound patterns of the changing seasons, they bring those seasons of living into the home.

Aside from the mail, which I had scanned for anything requiring immediate attention but not gone through envelope by envelope, there was all of the flotsam and jetsam of a winter of travel. Any traveler knows that simply from being in airports, hotels and rental cars, one accumulates entire catalogs of stuff. These include everything from newspapers and magazines to personal care items to travel bags. I took the weekend to go through these, creating three piles: keep, share and discard. The keep pile included everything from memory pieces for scrapbooking to the luggage and other items for travel itself. I cannot recommend the Tucano Work Out laptop bag highly enough; with it and a Grid-It I am fully prepared for travel time. Share items include personal care items from hotels to be shared with shelters, whose residents can always use such important but rarely donated items as shampoo and soap. After going through newspapers and magazines for content to paste onto memory pages, I bundled the remainder for recycling.

I took advantage of the quiet weekend to catch up on laundry, which is always as much a contemplative task as an active one. As suds and agitation whirl away the collective grime of travel, they send the disorientation of travel down the drain with the dirt. There is something about one's time in the neighborhood laundry -- a experience key to a blog about urban homekeeping if ever there was one -- that is grounding even if it is also something of a hassle. Whether they're a state of the art facility in your own home or a coin-op at the end of the street, there is something reassuring about laundry facilities. On our street in Astoria, it's all but a community center, as we come together with soap and softener to meet one of the most basic of human needs: clean clothes.

Back home, each item evoked a memory as I laid it across the drying rack or hung it on a hanger. As I stretched and blocked a favorite orange sweater, I recalled wearing it to our delayed Valentine's Day dinner in a steakhouse in central coast wine country. As I hung a plaid shirt to air dry, I recalled wearing it as I poked among the stacks at the Cosmopolitan, the dustiest, most crowded and best used bookstore in the world. A stack of touristy t-shirts came from the souvenir shops on Hollywood Boulevard. New jeans were the result of ducking into a mall when an unexpected rainstorm hit. As I put the laundry away, I put the memories into place with them. And that is the reward of clean laundry. Clean clothes look and feel good, and there is reward simply in completing the chore. But you are organizing your life as you put the clothes away just as surely as you cleansed it as you cleaned them.

In organizing my urban home over the long weekend, I was reconnecting with it. Aside from laundry, mail, plants and recycling, I deep cleaned the kitchen, including reorganizing the electrics, changed the bed linens, even gave the shower stall it's biannual mold inspection. As I engaged these activities, it dawned on me that I was, simply but meaningfully, spring cleaning. In a life of living seasonally, my grandmother considered spring cleaning as necessary a ritual as summer canning or winter gift-giving. That is a trait I have definitely inherited and have written about extensively. At the equinox, I wrote about the time of balance, of respecting this moment in time by the simple but profound act of achieving it. Each moment is a culmination but it is also a gateway. It contains what led up to it, even provides a platform on which to rest for a moment of observation and gratitude, but it also leads to the next moment.

In California, my daily walk down our residential stretch of Hollywood Boulevard takes me past the orange riot of birds of paradise, the peachy cones of ginger, spikes of succulent in every tone and texture from fuzzy silver to glossy green, the ancient sway of palm trees. Yes, one can walk in LA -- even hike, as the diehards carrying water bottles and, presumably, defibrillators to Runyon Canyon will attest -- and it is always an adventure. Cross a major intersection and our residential stretch of the Boulevard becomes the western end of the Walk of Fame, that famous black marble sidewalk inset with coral stars of untold tourist camera shots.. Fame waits to sneak up on you in Hollywood and that's just what the walk of fame does: the western edge manifests under a platinum gazebo known as the Gateway to Hollywood.

As I bundle travel bags together for one more trip -- this time to the storage facility in Astoria -- I don't know what the long-term future holds. John will return to New York City in May, a trip that we hope will coincide with the day when for twenty one years we have celebrated our anniversary and on which date we can, at long last and with gratitude to the state legislature, marry. We are already husbands, but once we are legally so, I cannot imagine being apart for the stretches of time that bi-coastal living has so far demanded. By the time of the summer solstice, it will have been six months since we started this journey. Decisions will have to be made. How I cherish the equilibrium of this chilly, sunny Easter weekend, for that solstice, the longest day of sunlight and warmth, may lead to the land of endless sun. Not only will it arrive soon, we are already on the path to it. Spring's chilly air and golden sunshine lead us there.