I see no one on my walk to Lyndhurst, not a soul. My only company, late-season thistles along the path.
A weathered sign by the open-air entrance to the old estate tells the story of my day in a word. Private.
The Old Croton Aqueduct trail runs right through the grounds. Apparently the first owner of the property was proud, ecstatic to have the water run underground here when the water pipe was first installed, carrying water miraculously down from upstate to New York City.
You can stay on the trail. Or follow mysterious mysterious arrows. I choose not to follow.
The lawns and old, old trees beckon. Robert Graves wrote, Tranquility is of no poetic use. I beg to disagree. This morning is sheer poetry. The calming late-summer scents of grass and trees, the hum of insects, the perfect glaze of sky.
I have wondered recently, Why is the sky blue? Such a silly question. The science has long been in. But still – blue? Perfect azure? Really? Could the universe really be this kind? I visit a grove of tulip trees.
They stand poker-straight and are probably two hundred years old. Come close and touch the grooves.
Geese feed themselves on grass. Quietly, unhurried, unworried.
I feed myself too. I am hungry, having not eaten yet today. Now I feed my soul. I go to my favorite linden, the huge specimen with multiple stems and an enclosed space like a private drawing room.
There are many lindens here, some still holding onto their magical lemony bracts.
Octavio Paz wrote:
Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.
Seeking even greater privacy, greater tranquility, I visit one of the gargantuan, ancient weeping beeches on the grounds,
I push aside the branches and enter, finding myself inside a place so silvery dark and still and mysterious that no photo can really do it justice.
Others have been here before. Hello Bob, who did you love?
The branches twist together, sinuous. So quiet, yet so alive.
I run my hand along a smooth, muscular bough.
I stand there. I do nothing. It takes a lot of time to be a genius, wrote Gertrude Stein. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. I’m no genius, but I know that doing nothing can be an art as great as any other.
The rose garden at Lyndhurst is also antique, designed by ladies a hundred years ago in concentric circles. Just outside its perimeter, late-season sage.
Hydrangea and its perfect clusters. I clearly need to find another word for perfect.
Only me here and the bees and the butterflies. No other human soul. I brush the sage with my hand and the scent wafts up. Here are September roses, flowers like no other.
Everything is perfectly still, lush, quiet. Perfectly private.
Spent rosebushes climbing a trellis have a beauty almost as exquisite as the blooms all around.
Rose hips hide themselves among the greenery.
Bees prowl the blossoms.
Hide inside, sip nectar.
Catbirds come calling. Lovely fragrances lift themselves, waft under my nose.
I wipe sweat from my brow and smell the sage I touched before. Lock the gate and leave. Just outside, some ancient spruces, one with the conjoined stems I love.
Cones litter the ground, brown on brown.
Wander, wander some more. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley told us, The beginning is always today. Under my feet, clover. I know that if I were to hunt hard enough, go down on my knees for long enough, I’d find one with four leaves. I feel that fortunate.
Then a lucky mushroom, the only one, a lucky one.
The tiny fuzz of a magnolia after it has had its spectacular blooms. A secret you need to really look to see.
A weeping cherry.
So mature its trunk is gnarled and crusty.
Near it a young’un with clearly demarcated lenticels, the stitch-like pores that form a cherry’s instantly recognizable embroidery.
And another ancient specimen, a red pine, all burls and character.
But still offering its miniature baby seedcases.
A horse chestnut with a gaping critter hole at its base. Anybody home?
Childhood memories of collecting chestnuts on my way to school.
The Lyndhurst faux castle looms ahead.
More compelling, the little children’s elf cottage nearby.
I check the door, locked. Peer into a window.
It’s as if the room is holding its breath, waiting for a child to come in and love it.
Outside, the emerald glow of a red maple canopy.
More lindens. A hush of lindens. All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. So said Andre Breton. He had my number, that’s for sure.
Departing, I step across the old cobble gutter from one hundred years ago, when the estate was new. I’m sure that at its beginning the place was marvelous.
Now, in its dotage, all its trees mature, rough, tried by time and weather. A sweet birch with time-scaled bark.
Today, personal, completely private. Old, yet new.
All the more precious.
Jean Zimmerman 