Yes, it Rhymes

When my older daughter, Anika, was very young, one of her school assignments was to compose a poem. She asked if I’d like to hear the poem, and very proudly recited it. She probably read it to me from her sparkly Hello Kitty spiral-bound notebook. I don’t remember the content, but after she finished I said something like “That was lovely! Was it supposed to be a poem that rhymes? Because … it doesn’t rhyme.”

With the supreme confidence of a six-year-old in tights, she said, “Yes, it rhymes.”

Among my sisters and me, “It rhymes” has become our go-to phrase for any time we mean a person is in denial about something, or is out-of-step with reality.

Yet I’ve come to appreciate her response. “Yes, it rhymes” captures a multitude of positive attitudes within those three simple words. It is confidence. It is defiance. It is optimism.

I’m not sure why, but the phrase came to mind instantly this morning when I looked out my window on the marsh behind my house. Among the oodles of barren trees standing straight and tall are seven or eight birch trees that are leaning together to the west. My eyes always fall on that group of trees when I look that way.

I like to think they’re leaning towards the mid- to- late-afternoon sun, and I find that kind of endearing. Hopeful. Resilient. While the rest of the trees stand dumbly accepting their fate (it is November, after all…hello!), this plucky group leans toward the sun to eke out every last bit of goodness it has to offer at the end of the day. At the close of the year.

It turns out, after I’ve Googled about birches for a few minutes, it’s more likely that they are leaning due to wind or erosion. My opinion stands. They seem hopeful. Resilient. It rhymes.

You can learn a lot from Wikipedia (I no longer sneer at it, ever since a librarian pointed out that it is frequently checked and updated by all kinds of experts. That’s good enough for my purposes). The word birch means “to shine” or “to whiten,” presumably referring to the bark. And perhaps it is the bark that draws my eye when I look that way, but I think it’s more about their posture of going their own way, as a group, no less. Birches are among the pioneer species of trees, which means they are the first to colonize arid landscapes that have been disrupted, as by fire. They tend to be hardy and adaptable. Birches are described as opportunistic, which seems a bit judgy, “able to sustain harsh conditions with casual indifference.”

Culturally, birches are valued around the world for various reasons. To the Celts, birches symbolize growth, renewal, stability, and adaptability. In Umeå, Sweden, silver birches were said to have halted the spread of a fire in 1888 that nearly burnt the city to the ground. Afterwards, the city planted wide avenues with silver birches, and it is now known as Björkarnas Stad — City of the Birches.

This all reminds me of the poem, Birches, by Robert Frost, so I Google that. “When I see birches bend to left and right / across the lines of straighter, darker trees,/ I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.” I wrote a paper about this poem in my sophomore year of college, having no real clue what it was about (as my grade on the paper indicated). It’s about remembering childhood pursuits in a yearning to escape adulthood realities, if only for a moment. “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

One could do worse than repeat “Yes, it rhymes,” in the face of those who tell you it doesn’t.

Elizabeth Edwards wrote “You recognize a survivor when you see one. You recognize a fighter when you see one.”

As a woman who lost a 16-year-old child in a horrific accident, who demonstrated strength of character throughout her husband’s very public marital infidelity, and who ultimately waged a battle against and died of cancer, she endured a lot of heartache in her life. In her book entitled Resilience, she wrote, “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”

We’re navigating the ongoing reality of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with uncertainty surrounding the 2020 election and the unsettling nature of societal discord (literally, dis – “apart” + cord – “hearts”). It’s a lot. Pandemic fatigue is a Thing, and the future, while I know I am in God’s hands, feels more askew than it ever has before. I am reminded of another take-away from Resilience. Elizabeth Edwards had these words of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem painted on her kitchen wall: “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

One could do worse than find encouragement from song lyrics, comfort in trees that can take it, and inspiration in a dying woman’s words. And I choose to believe that, in a time of unprecedented upheaval, when I sometimes feel untethered, unmoored, I could do worse than recall the sweet memory of a little person who shook her head at me and claimed “Yes, it rhymes” on her way upstairs to change into her Pocahontas costume.