Spring

Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

We’re spinning broken records lately, up on the hill. Not the Michael Phelps or Sidney Crosby kind of broken records, but the kind that skip and jump, repeating the same snippet of scratchy music over and over. Coming home from work the other day, yet another section of scrubby undergrowth along the country club road had been bull-dozed, leaving the same sort of ugly destruction that has become all too common around our community. I may start taking the longer way round, just to avoid this latest round of carnage.

While D does many nice things for me—chief among them, a home-made cappuccino every morning—perhaps the nicest was introducing me to a whole genre of music that I was too young to experience when it was new. Our iPods and stereo cabinet overflow with Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen. Something about these singer-songwriters, with their smart and literate lyrics and folk-inspired melodies, struck a chord with me. Hearing them for the first time was a revelation, and over the years, I have memorized album after album, just like a junior high kid. The fact that so many of the songs deal with the turmoil of the 60s—Viet Nam, the environment, civil rights—gives a lot of the music more than a tinge of sadness. Hopelessness, even. Now, with fifty years’ worth of hindsight, that sadness has become a burnished melancholy, which fits my approaching-middle-age world view pretty well.

So, last week, when I rounded the corner and saw wild crabapple and pear trees in full bloom, covered in white and pink blossoms, but hacked off at the ground and lying on their sides, helter-skelter over a multi-acre space, Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” popped into my head immediately. We’ve picked yet another patch of flowers—when will we learn? The fact that the trees were strewn like bodies on a battlefield made a later verse of the song all the more fitting:

Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one--
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Some may have looked at the parcel of land and seen nothing but a weedy, littered patch, ripe for yet another McMansion. But it was a rare natural spot along that increasingly busy road, a tiny wild refuge for flying and crawling and hopping things, and now it’s gone. I know, I know, “It held a handful of rabbits. What’s the big deal?” Yeah, a bunch of bunnies. A dozen or so tribes of Native Americans. A few thousand Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica. The Inca and Mayan empires. Entire species of animals. Six million Jews and 11 million other non-Aryans. It adds up. The bunnies add up.

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Where Have All the Flowers Gone --Pete Seeger, 1961