thehudson – ARUNDHATI BASU

This Spring of Contrasts

I had my first sighting of the leaves. Tiny green leaves are sprouting on the smaller plants in fits and starts all over the park. But the older trees, they are stubborn. They are holding onto status quo. This is a spring when we have had snatches of days that could not have been more at odds with each other. If there have been days of liquid sunshine with skies to match, snow has coated the boughs on days, and then there was that day when the fog was thick and heavy, it sat upon my eyelashes as I went out for a run. And the sunsets, let me not even get started about their exquisite beauty as they flame out into the skies.

The squirrels have started showing in greater numbers. They look suitably plump after their hibernation with possibly a decent reserve of nuts. Oh, and there are robins too! Now I have heard that it is a misnomer that robins appear during spring, but oh they do. There are whole bunches of them hopping up and down the slopes of the park, pecking and looking delightful with their breasts of red. As I felt this spirit of joy quickening in their sudden presence, I remembered my mother’s obsession with the cuckoo who lives somewhere in the coconut trees in our backyard in Calcutta. She gets great pleasure from telling me in detail about its odd timings for calling out, till I start zoning out, and the other day, I realised (with a tinge of horror and amusement) that this apple has fallen not too far from its tree.

Apr 10, 2018

Arundhati Basu58 Comments

The Return of the Squirrel

I can feel the march of spring. Could be a flash in the pan though. Smoky blue days making way for sunny ones replete with the network of bare branches and portly natives returning to scrounge nuts. But then there are hardly any, so with bushy tails fanning above their backs they scamper right up to you and rear upon their minuscule hind legs just like the comical meerkats you cooed over in Dartmoor.

Feb 21, 2018

Arundhati Basu54 Comments

A February Afternoon

My face is tingling and my fingers which have been throbbing because I kept them long enough outside the pockets to click a few images of the Hudson, frozen in parts, is thawing and humming alongside. I am still shivering though my nose is telling me that it is relieved to be back inside again, breathing the warm cosiness that is home.

I have been feeling strangely out of sorts for some time now. Ennui sounds immeasurably better than it feels. Who knows why I have been feeling this way but I shall tell you now that the icy winds by the Hudson whip them right out of the body. Everything just comes together out there, you know. The race tracks which are empty but for the gaggle of geese collecting at one end as if priming themselves up for a race, the old man in his signature yellow sweatshirt who inspires me with his tenacity to run outside in the bitter cold, the slabs of ice on the Hudson, the boulders all iced up that glisten in the soft-as-feather rays of the afternoon sun, the stray branches coated with icicles that sitting upon the boulders, the skein of ducks who bury their necks deep into their plump bodies so that you just see orbs of brown and white bobbing upon the waves, spiky hundreds of brown sweet gum balls gathering by the sides of the trails running through the park. Every bit counts.