Swept Off My Feet

“The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. “ “The Return of the Native” by Thomas Hardy

Egdon, in “The Return of the Native”, is a heath that has remained constant in its topography since time immemorial. On Guy Fawkes day, bonfires light up the night skies as men and women appear briefly against the backdrop of this primeval permanence; ephemeral as the wind that blows and the rains that whip against in its season of time.

The last week of October 2013 in New York City began mild and unusually warm, with similar predictions for the rest of the week. That Friday, November 1, however, loomed cold and blustery, unaccountably so for that time of year and as I left work I was nearly swept off my feet.

In Bayside, Queens where I grew up in the 1950’s, I remember four distinct seasons: Summer with dandelions barely moving in the still air, falling leaves rustling in the wisps of new born currents in Autumn; Winter, with its snow drifts and howling winds; and in Spring, blossoms surging in the gentle breezes.

It was Ephraim, a classmate of mine at PS 46 in Bayside who first swept me off my feet. I don’t remember the season, but I was young and everything made sense then. “For every season, turn, turn, turn …. There is a reason …..

As I return home from work now and turn on the radio, the airways are full of death, killings and wanton destruction, every single day - in mails, airports, school yards, elevators, hallways and highways; home invasions with dire consequences and a girl who “just said no” to a prom invitation, slaughtered.

Flailing in the wind and brutal cold, the winter of 2013 was treacherous, with ice, bitter temperatures and constant snowstorms making the streets nearly impassable. As Spring unfolded, the forsythias and crap apples appeared in a burst of glory, only to be knocked down by ferocious winds; an overnight snow fall covered cars and roads and a torrential rain sank an entire street in Baltimore.

If the seasons can’t keep to a plan, how can we? Topsy-turvy and all mixed up, for every season, there is no reason; our emotional and mental states of mind are no longer anchored to the seasons .....

No wonder people are going berserk. After surviving a grave medical crisis I was swept off my feet in the dead of winter, fell in love as the spring buds burst forth, momentarily came to a halt in the still air of summer, bloomed anew in the soft beauty of a late summer day, broke apart with the falling leaves of Autumn and was knocked over, kaput, in the dead of winter.

Both grief-filled and hilarious, my memories have kept me grounded and paradoxically serve to steady me, but every so often I too feel the emotional winds, barren and lifeless and need to be reset. On a classic Autumn day in Bayside, a tree has turned magenta and a pumpkin strategically placed on a stoop fills me with wonder.

Last August, returning to Bayside via Fresh Meadows, cell phone glued to my ear as I try to negotiate a summer getaway at my sister’s house in Pennsylvania, I almost missed seeing the side streets that I was passing through - velvet leaves enveloped in a soft mist with waves of tremulous light glistening like jewels -a seascape of haze and green clouds, refracted back through time to my childhood.

I am swept off my feet again, and …

Intoxicated, find myself running down 73rd Avenue, leaping across 188 Street, skirting the Robert Moses apartment complex to my right, across Francis Lewis Boulevard, through the ball parks, past Buddy’s Deli (there since I was a child) bounding over Bell Boulevard and landing smack in front of the garden apartment that I grew up in on 218th Street and became, just like Hardy’s hero Clym Yeobright, (albeit in Northeastern Queens!) ….. The Return of the Native.

“The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. “