THE BEAUTY AND THE UGLINESS

Our town has been in a frenzy of flowering excitement this spring. The pear trees have outdone any previous years in the matter of blossoms. They stand like fat upside down exclamation points as if silently expressing their own surprise. The yellow footlights of the daffodil patches scattered about the city seem to trumpet, "Look up, look up!"

My Bradford pear, so close to the triple north windows, would have sent some flowering branches into the room if I could have lowered the paint-stuck upper sashes. With hammer, screwdriver, chisel and other assorted tools I tried to get them open just for the pure pleasure and unusualness of having a living, blossoming tree limb inside the house. It might have rated a call to Better Homes and Gardens or Architectural Digest. I even fantasized that one of the resident mockingbirds might alight on an inside-the-house branch and give a musical rendition of "Springtime, Sweet Springtime We Greet Thee With Song." The mockingbird may have decided to come on in and inspect the rest of the house. If all that had happened I might have flown right out the opened window, fallen into a fat rabbit's hole (very fat rabbit) and arrived at Alice's Wonderland.

Back to semi-sanity, let me tell you again about my pear tree, in case I've spoken about it before. I'm into the age of re-runs. I purposely had the pear tree planted there, close to the house, so that I could enjoy the big white bouquet in the springtime, its spicy perfume, watch the birds flitting in and out of it in summer, the frolicking squirrels in winter. And for many years, I did. Then along came a wind that twisted like a whirlwind raised to the 15th power and blew that tree down.

So out came Haman's chain saw and shaved off the stump right even with the ground. I was sad and grumpy for many days afterward. Had Grandma been around I'd have been treated with sulfur and molasses or a cup of yarrow tea. But wait! Next year some little sprouts came up around the stump. Fascinated, I let them grow and now, a few years later, have a shrub tree taller and more rounded at the ground than the first tree, that is if I can call it the first tree. Maybe parent tree would be better -- parent tree of quintuplets. If anything but wordiness can be derived from this account, maybe it is that if your pear tree blows down, don't despair. It's a cut-and-come-again thing, like grass.

The mockingbirds go on and on, too, generation after generation. In my lifetime at this location I've witnessed mockingbirds gradually coming up from the southlands to stay the year round. Suits me fine.

Their favorite habitat at my place is the autumn olive hedge. When the hedge is in bloom, spilling its perfume, and the mockingbirds are making nests and singing, those are some of the things that are "whatsoever is beautiful and of good report," I keep my mind on. Or, at least try to.

Sometimes my mind wanders off in puzzlement, as if I really have dropped into the Rabbit's hole. If someone guided me into a $1,000 investment which rapidly made $100,000, how much did the adviser to invest and so make? If fathers abandon their families so the families can get government money, is that considered a virtue by such fathers? Not in Bill Bennett's "Book of Virtues." Is every crime committed now traced to parental abuse? Such a handy device for lawyers. How rich do you have to be to run for a political office, especially a high office? Is postage raised in order to handle the volume of mail or to reduce the volume of it? Have you heard that "they" are stealing children to sell body parts? Is it politically correct for me to ask any of these questions?

I look out into the blossoming pear tree and methinks I see a Cheshire cat there, grinning wickedly at me, as if it knows all the answers but not one word is going to slip past those shiny teeth which are the only thing I see after a while, or are they the pear blossoms?

REJOICE!