Point of View: In Full Flower

   I played on grass on Sunday. On the surface, of course. And it was wonderful. Not only because it’s so easy on the feet, but also because we — me and Al — won!

    Playing on a grass tennis court is my idea of heaven, so it was appropriate, I suppose, that it was Sunday.

    “Some keep the Sabbath — going

    to church —

    I — keep it — staying at Home —

    With a Bobolink — for a

    Chorister —

    And an Orchard for a Dome. . . .”

    That, of course, was Emily Dickinson, whose Trinity was the Bee, the Butterfly, and the Breeze.

    I felt that way too last weekend, driving through Springs, which was in full flower. We even had a peony in our garden, which largely has been abandoned to the deer, and it smelled wonderful. With a storm brewing later, I made sure to stake it. Something so beautiful should stand erect, not hunch.

    Aside from the grass courts at Buckskill, I also worship in our outdoor shower, a bower whose fading, white-painted frame on Sunday was nearly overgrown by honeysuckle and rhododendron blossoms. Over it all were the trees and a sky so blue.

    “. . . Instead of getting to Heaven,

    at last —

    I’m going, all along.”

    Perhaps it’s this feeling that makes it so hard, especially at this time of year, to concentrate on what we call the news — largely the enormities, outrages, freakishness, and universal griefs that would vie with fecund nature for our attention, clawing at us when we should be out with Larry Penny listening for the whippoorwill’s call, which, after driving miles and miles he heard one recent night in Hither Hills.

    Jane Schacher played it for me on her iPad. And the chuck-will’s-widow’s song too, and, once I’d remembered its name, the nightingale’s, “pouring forth [its] soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!”

    It don’t get no better than this.