Shakespeare said that sleep “winds the raveled sleeve of care.” And so it does. Mercy.
But before my eyes are even open, when the first conscious thoughts begin to come, that sleeve is looking frayed about the edges. This morning it had unwound a good part of its way before I got out of bed, and it was continuing this raveling, trailing down the stairs behind me, trailing out the door, following me all along the way I walked. I walked fast, thought hard, prayed and prayed.
The morning was beautiful. The sky was clear, and already everything is richly green here in North Carolina. I forced my gaze up– the tendency always is to watch one’s feet– to look at the uppermost leaves who know the sunlight long before I do. Several people were out already, walking their dogs. A bluebird glared at me from its perch on a wire.
His mercies are new every morning, you know.
I hurried home and walked up the stone steps through our side garden. Ivy has claimed too much of our yard; the task of pulling it up, begun several weeks ago now and then abandoned, must be resumed. To my left it was all azaleas and ivy and the slow return of the black-eyed Susans which are, for now, only leaves.
And then I saw it, amidst this morass of indistinguishable green: the curled tip of fern. We have ferns in this garden; I had forgotten that. I stopped and looked at them and found that several are fully open, their delicate fronds extended like so many hands.
But the curled one looks like a fiddle-head. Fiddle-heads. I had forgotten these too. My father showed them to us when we were camping years ago in the Adirondacks. I may have been four years old or younger. He showed them to us where they grew up from the forest floor. We picked them and cooked them (how?) and ate them at our camp. They were delicious.
Are ferns fiddle-heads? I don’t know. I don’t know what fiddle-heads are, but I aim to know. Meanwhile there was the curled tip of yet another fern’s leaf, and another. Six of them or more. They blended in so easily in all that green. And yet there they were: quiet self-assertion, unfurling with delicate deliberation, claiming habitation amidst the ivy, extending their fingers to wait for the sun.
I bet Thoreau ate fiddle-heads, if he could find them.
And when he lived out there in the woods on Walden Pond, was this all that unfurled for him of a morning? Just the fiddle-heads, just the ferns, who waited for nothing but light and rain? There was no unraveling in his mind, was there? No residing concern, no presiding worry that carried over from the night before. Nothing unfurling but ferns.
Sometimes I think I’d like to find my own Walden Pond. I would build a house not far from the water. I would plant a little garden. I would pull up all the ivy.
