Easter soon, unlike the last

Middle of February, snowing outside-- And it will be Easter soon, which brings to mind last year's Easter, when we went out for a picnic and other Easter-y activities in Sutter Creek.

This year it will be different. This year there will be solitude, distance, activities in which few of us participate together, at least from my perspective. There will be uncoordinated traditions, new ones springing from the still-beating hearts of the old ones, people will be missed and feelings will bear longing and phone calls will be made, videos made, recordings, journals, words, memories-- It all will find a way to not really happen, but not be missed, and then it won't really fade and will somehow still be experienced together regardless of where we all reside.

So. Last year's. We all seem to love Sutter Creek, why we don't actually live there I'm not really sure. It wasn't much of a spring afternoon--or maybe it was, I guess I don't know what a typical spring afternoon should entail, at least with our family--but it was overcast and gloomy, almost a little too cold, but not quite. The river that runs right through the town underneath that old crumbling concrete bridge poured with full strength, and for a while Mikie and Jarom and I threw rocks at it and watched them sink abruptly, pulling to the left, ready to wash ashore again on some other day, in some other place. A lingering prospector's kind-of-treasure-hunting feeling was in me--that being a silly part of my life at the time--and I still feel it now when I think of last year's Easter, a twang of nostalgia mixed with longing.

We captured Jarom's egg hunt on video--all that enthusiasm, provenance unfounded, excitement that seemed to transfer among us all as we watched, almost tearfully--something so youthful and carefree and joyous, something we'd all been mostly missing and realized it just then, that there's a fragment void in us all, and witnessing a moment of its actual existence temporarily fills that void and causes in us something unexpected and recalled from childhood and even spiritual, magical.

We ate lunch with fervor before trekking out that untraveled road an additional 19 miles or so to Daffodil Hill, a name? a city? a town? A place we knew existed but didn't know of anything else, all except Heather who had been there before. To the rest of us it was enigmatic, and worth venturing down a windy backroad to discover. Upon arrival we found that Daffodil Hill was closed for the season, a sign posted cited this was due to "unprecedented rainfall" and that the flowers were not sightfully in bloom or something along those lines. It was a small ranch, a few miniature windmills scattered about the grounds, picnic tables here and there and other groups of people, emerging from minivans, stumbling upon the same closed farm as we.

In an odd moment, paradoxical for some reason, a gang of motorcyclists happened through--you know the type: leather jackets, bandanas, graying beards and mustaches, doubled up on each bike, man in front, woman clinging bravely to said man's chest and dressed alike in a dual presentation of forthright rebellion and adventure--each stopping at that stop sign before continuing on their bizarre path to an unknown destination as they crossed some forgotten highway road, in the forgotten forests of some tiny nook in the center of Northern California. These roads were built by some, by those with an interest in their being built, and these bikers, bound together in small-town camaraderie somehow--they've found likeminded people where it seems firstminded people, if at all, are unlikely to be found.

And it just kind of sent me this impression--this feeling--that no matter what you think you are, or where, that you're alone but not really, not permanently, because there are just too damn many people around to really be alone. It's impossible. Somehow we'll always find the similarities, the comparisons, and it will make us feel valuable and loved and necessary. And somehow through this we are all still unique, and strive to be so, and are captured in our whirlwind thoughts and lives, somewhere, leaving small traces of ourselves, little bits and pieces that contaminate the places we pass through and the people at whom we stare, or talk to, or affect in any number of countless ways.

So those bikers. They just passed on, and then we took some pictures of it all and piled back into our three-car caravan full of interconnected Placerville-lives, leaving behind everything that only we could leave behind, because others, they leave us behind, in this connect-the-dots matching game of life and experience and influence where no drawing is ever finished and no one ever seems to win.

[Taken from a notebook entry on the day of 19 February 2006]