This morning I stopped to investigate the Longfellow Garden (primarily a spot for the consumption of workday lunches out of foam trays; secondarily a poem garden for coffee writing). This is its first springtime after two years of seriously destructive renovations. It is ironic that the destruction was caused by the expansion of the Maine Historical Society, whose library claimed my favorite spaces at the back of the garden, covered recesses or grottoes maximally spiritually remote from the city, yet surrounded in its sounds. I think there was a cedar tree, and also a hidden bench around a corner; I sat there and watched ants carrying little pebbles up out of their home and understood for the first time the construction of anthills. Whatever ant-earth there may have been between flagstones pushed apart by decades of weed life is gone; the bricks are new and tight. The lion fountain is the same as before—his eyes are radically unfocused; there's no conceivable angle from which eye contact is possible (I think this is rare for representations of lions)—but the cistern into which he dribbles looks new (part of the horror is not knowing which elements have been replaced; preserving some of the original somehow ensures that the destruction of memory is total (yet: "The garden as a whole was rehabilitated following preservation standards, and retains the character and replicates many of the plantings found in Lamb’s original sketches"

I can never resist dipping the last page of my notebook in holy waters like those of the lion's cistern (many dippings into the eternal puddle in the parking lot of the Bethesda Lutheran Church on St. Ronan's (the Pool of Bethesda (kneeling to drink from a puddle, the highest form of worship

I suppose it is wrong to judge a garden in April; I hope that in July it is impossible to see end to end, that it is brambly, and that bees will alight again on purple coneflowers (the radiance of genus Echinacea is the highest form of praise