New natural gas lines are coming to my old Louisiana neighborhood, and the advance teams have been busy this spring as they sort out where everything should go. Survey crews combed the streets last month, placing tiny flags in our yards to mark out water lines and other utilities so they can be avoided when the digging starts.
Meanwhile, we homeowners have had our own knots to untie.
All of us are doing our best to cut the first grass of the season while dodging those little stakes that dot our lawns. I’ve been struck by how quickly our eyes adjust to accept new parts of our daily landscape. Those miniature flags, bright orange, green, and yellow, now seem as much a fixture to me as the azaleas with their April blooms or the Japanese magnolia’s purple petals, cupped like votive candles as they bask in the sun.
All this digging in my small corner of the city has nudged me to think of my neighborhood’s twin lives — the one I see above ground each day, in the winding sidewalks and giant oaks, and the quiet world that trembles below, among the clay and the worms and the tiny bulbs and seeds doing their secret work.
Inevitably, this brings my thoughts to Foster, our faithful terrier, gone some years now but seldom far from mind. If you’ve ever had a terrier, then you’ll know that they embrace this double view of life above and below the ground all the time.
Like most other terriers, Foster loved to burrow — so much so that he’d wiggle deep beneath the blankets once he’d talked himself into our children’s beds.
Foster’s zeal for excavation made my walks with him an adventure.
We’d be strolling along the pavement, taking in the birdsong and sunshine, when his nostrils would flare and his body would tense, like a fishing line tightened by a captive perch. Then the furious digging would begin, the dirt and grass flying as he threw clods of earth from his tiny paws.
I assumed he’d sniffed out a mole and was on the hunt. What worried me, though, was the not so small matter that he was vandalizing a neighbor’s lawn. I’d tug on the leash and urge him along, but it was a hard slog for me and that fierce little mutt. He was a predator entranced by his prey, not easily budged from his vivid dreams of conquest.
I now walk alone these days as I pad along familiar blocks — a ritual that has moved me, as Easter arrives, to dwell on an abiding miracle. The wonders of the season — the greening dogwood and trailing jasmine, the salamanders sunning on my front porch — have risen from the cold, black soil beneath our feet.
It’s been a solace in this anxious year to think that life finds a way to push through the darkness.
Correction: Last week's column included the wrong name for the magazine that Graydon Carter edited during the later years of his career. He's most famous for editing Vanity Fair.     Â
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.