The March Playlist
I have felt rather nostalgic lately. Specifically, I have been thinking about the weeks in late January 2020 after we arrived home from spending a magical month in Europe. We were so happy to be home. We had no idea that we were about to spend the next year trapped there thanks to a global pandemic.
For whatever reason, that slice of time has felt particularly precious to me lately. But when I mentioned that to Matt one night at dinner he said, “I try to remind myself that someday today might be the slice of time I am longing for.”
Oh, that’s good.
All of this reminds me of a favorite Billy Collins poem entitled “Nostalgia”:
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today…
Today New Mexico is unseasonably warm. We have catapulted ourselves straight from non-winter into early summer. Even my tulips are confused. No wonder we feel a bit nostalgic.
…Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks…
Remember January? Remember February? It feels like just 3 minutes ago I was creating the January and then the February playlists of my practice verbs and action items. Time expands and contracts like a slinky these days. Any day now I will wake up and it will be April. Good grief.
The 2026 March Playlist.
Gardening: The writer Calvin Trillin used to worry that his daughters would grow up jaded because they were experiencing a New York childhood; he put great stock in his midwestern upbringing. So, he would tell them: "All evidence to the contrary, you are being raised in Kansas City."
I use a similar magical thinking in my New Mexico garden and try to pretend that I am gardening in the Cotswolds. All evidence to the contrary.
It’s a stretch, for sure.
March is the month of hard garden labor no matter where you find yourself. March is about pruning and clearing flowerbeds and shoveling in compost. There are no peonies in my desert cottage garden, or hydrangeas, or dahlias. Instead, I have to find my peace with lots of native grasses, agaves, prickly pear cacti. Still, red poppies pop out everywhere, tall hollyhocks dance in the breeze, roses bloom with abandon. I could supply a farmstand with fresh rosemary and mint. My amaryllis leaves are six inches tall. The next round of salad greens is sprouting. And when I glance out my window, I see nothing but green green green in the backyard. Spring with a twist of lime.
Teaching: In the studio, we have been doing improvisations using prompt cards with words like “bashful” or “awestruck” or “horrifying.” Several weeks ago, Lucie drew the card “stupid.” In order to nudge her thinking, I asked her to come up with a moment in the last week when she might have felt stupid or witnessed something stupid. “I know I probably did lots of stupid things last week,” she said, “but right now I can’t think of any.”
Well, let me help you, I said. Yesterday Matt and I were in the garden. Matt was doing his annual pruning of the big bushes with the electric clippers. Just before he began, he said to me, “Remember last year when I accidentally clipped through the extension cord? I’m going to try not to do that again.”
I hadn’t actually remembered this, but it seemed perfectly plausible. I laughed and went back to my weeding and left him to his work. Not five minutes went by when I heard cursing on the other side of the wall. Yep. You guessed it. Matt had cut through the extension cord. Again.
“How is this possible?” I asked him.
I offered this story to twelve-year-old Lucie as a perfect example of “stupid.” She looked at me and asked “How is that even possible?”
God only knows.
But then two days later, this happened:
We have a filtered water faucet in our kitchen sitting apart from the sink. At least 108 times a day, Matt or I will set a glass on the counter, start the faucet to fill it with water and then walk away and forget. This is not an exaggeration, and yet despite having to repeatedly clean up spilled water, we do not learn our lesson.
But on this particular day, I put a glass on the counter, started the faucet and walked away for like 15 minutes. Suddenly, I heard a beeping like a fire alarm was going off. I went into the kitchen to discover water everywhere. Furthermore, the water was leaking down into the basement right on top of the hot water heater, which had gone into flood alarm mode. I cleaned up the water, but had no idea, short of calling a plumber, what do to about the loud incessant beeping. I had to cancel two lessons, and text Matt sheepishly, “I have created a self-inflicted plumbing emergency…”
He replied graciously, “Could absolutely have been me. Keep me posted.”
And then:
“Now Lucie has a song subject for next week.”
Reading: I have a dear 89-year-old friend named Carolyn. Whenever we get together, Carolyn always has reading assignments for me. Sometimes there are books I better be ready to discuss at our next lunch. Others are pure pleasure. This one is the latter: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. As my friend Lora would say, the human spirit triumphs all over the damn place. It is a welcome antidote to the news of the world right now.
The new Tana French book comes out this week. Tana French writes fantastic, gripping detective novels set in Ireland. Her books are addictive, psychologically brilliant, pure literature of the highest order. This latest book The Keeper arrives just in time for my spring break. Perfect.
Listening: I first heard Dvorak’s “Dumky” Piano Trio when I was at a chamber music festival one summer during college. I thought (and still do) that when the piece turned from the slow opening section into the first eruption of the Allegro it was one of the great musical moments of all time.
I go long stretches without hearing or thinking about the Dumky Trio, but it’s back on my listening playlist these days because the MovSol trio is playing it again next month. Every time I hear this glorious music, I smile.
Writing (from The Unwelcomed Guest March 2020):
Some fun facts:
On March 11, 2020, New Mexico reported its first four Covid cases. The state began shutting down on March 13.
On March 11, 2021, I received my first vaccine shot. The world seemed to be coming out of hibernation, exploding open joyfully.
On March 11, 2022, Matt and I are locked in our house in quarantine. From each other. Matt has Covid.
Writing these fun facts makes my head spin. Or, to quote one of my precocious six-year-old kids who answers all my requests with the sassy: “Are you kidding me?” (I never am kidding, actually.) I’d like to scream to the universe, to whoever might be listening:
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
… I have found myself thinking a lot about March 2020 this week, reliving both the uncertainty and anxiety of those days, and also revisiting the choices I made then about how to fill my hours: would I keep teaching? Practicing? Exercising? Eating vegetables? When the world is falling apart around us, how do we choose to spend our time?
…Last Friday, March 18, was the 30th anniversary of Matt and my first kiss. 30 years. Three decades. Ten times ten thousand kisses. “This is strange,” Matt said the first night of quarantine when we were preparing for beds in our separate rooms. “Let’s not make this a habit.” After the two years where we have eyed every person we meet with suspicion, our current habits and attitudes might give one pause and reason for concern about the future of humanity. A red heart appearing on one’s phone is not the same as a hug. Avoiding those we love is lonely. There’s been plenty of compelling reasons why we have needed to adopt these artificial and isolating behaviors, but life is too short and we need each other too much.
Please friends, let’s not make this a habit.
Practicing and Rehearsing: This weekend was the Springtime Movable Sol set of programs with my friend and violinist Ruxandra. The program included the Robert Schumann’s Violin Sonata in A Minor, a restless and stormy piece, which mirrors “in like a lion, out like a lamb” March weather. Not to mention the chaos of the times in which we find ourselves.
Also on the program was Stravinsky’s “Suite after themes, fragments and pieces by Giambattista Pergolesi.” Pergolesi was a Baroque composer, and actually one of several composers whose melodies Stravinsky used (stole?) for his ballet Pulcinella. In 1925 he then took these tunes and created this brilliant six-movement suite of dances for violin and piano. One of my favorite recordings on YouTube calls this piece “obnoxiously difficult, making a point of creating as much awkwardness for the violinist and pianist as possible.”
It is that. And then some. But it is the juxtaposition of the old Baroque tunes against Stravinsky’s modern language that makes this piece so magical. And so perfect when my sense of time continues to shrink and contract in a nonsensical manner.
Or to quote Billy Collins again:
…As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
Friends, here’s to our slice in time. Hold it dear.