Never too late to be a late bloomer

Trees are finally beginning to bud, adding another hue of fluorescent green to an already saturated palette. Tonight at dusk a deer purviewed the new greens at the edge of our backyard, leisurely nibbling this new leaf and not that, as if choosing which morsels to sample from the produce section at Whole Foods. We've waited a long time to inhabit this spring, forgiving today's chilly and rainblown below 50's temps. Of late I've considered the things that ongoingly occupy the geography of my psyche and have been struck by the fact that almost all of what is crucial to me, what is impossible to imagine being without, are things that came so late to me I remain astounded and grateful they ever showed up at all. Foremost, my husband, who swept me off my rollerblade-clad feet long after I'd relinquished the idea that I'd ever stumble upon the one man who could fuse his being with this complicated and contrary soul and show me in a thousand ways what it means to love, and which resulted in two radiant daughters, a constant heartbreak of beauty for which no superlatives suffice. And then, whodathunkit, poetry. I never read it, never thought about writing it, never did, apart from a very few "roses are red" stanzas in grade school. My first attempt at thirty, after relunctantly signing up for a poetry writing class when all other English sections were closed, and now it's a passion. Science. I finagled every means I could to take as little math and science as possible and graduate. Now I buy physics books second to poetry and fiction, making up for lost time and the great black holes in my knowledge. I had no idea of grandeur housting this whacky realm we call our existence, the poetry and paradox of creation. All the ways the mind can be boggled. Graduate school, Indian food, rollerblading, Branston pickle, yoga, vows, diapers, Borges, Buechner, Bruce Cockburn, Adam Zagajewski, Simon Veil, Kierkegarrd, Smog, Joseph Arthur, Ray LaMontagne, Patty Griffin, the Flaming Lips: all after thirty, some way after. Which leads me to believe there just might be more boggling to come. Better late than never, they say. Sometimes just better late.