Nothing like a brisk walk on the first day of spring in East Lawrence with a good friend. Along the way, we saw many more friendly sites, all illuminating the wonderful quirkiness of East Lawrence just on the cusp of leafing out and flowering forth.
First, there is a totem tree of sorts, complete with a glow-in-the-dark giant cricket, strange moppet-like figure living in the hole, and a kind of anime carving on top. It’s something new, I believe, just sprouted on a quiet street, and in the process, it reminds me of how the creative just a big plastic bug away.
As we move on, we find lots of gardens tumbling themselves into a few daffodils here, some hyacinth there, all happily unfurling because of the recent rain after too long a drought. Down Pennsylvania Street, we discover the cloudy days makes more than the vegetation pop. Here’s a lovely purple-to-electric-blue-trimmed home, still flying the flag of some Christmas lights, bringing whimsy and verve to a quiet street.
No East Lawrence trek is ever complete without stopping at the Wishing Bench, something that started with just a bench 
and a few ribbons, then carnival-Bollywood-exploded into all manner of color and texture. As we were sitting there, casting out our wishes to the air, a man with a colorful sign saying he was “homeless, not hopeless,” called out to us about how he sits in that bench wishing everyday. He’s even helped bolster some of the soggy wood around it, and he was now musing about improving his efforts with some nails. We didn’t have any nails or dollars to give him, but we shared the Wishing Bench magic, all of us affirming that the bench’s slogan — “You will not be disappointed” — is true. Adding to that truth are new items — a tea pot for one, plus many plastic, woven, knitted, and found critters from various dimensions of the galaxy. I already wasn’t disappointed.
Toward the end of the walk, we were taken by the peeling paint on the top of a stand-alone garage, almost iridescent in the cloud-light. Many shades of sky permeated the layers of time on the worn siding. It reminded me that this moment is composed of Wabi Sabi, the Japanese quality with no English equivalent that can mean the perfection of imperfection, or the beauty of passing memory, or simply, what’s alive and storied all along us as we age and change.
Returning, I remembered that we live in a Wabi Sabi world, and there’s nothing like walking through that world to remember that.
