Winter's Last Quiet

It’s odd to be writing an essay about spring when it’s 33 degrees outside.  I feel like I do when I have a miserable hacking cough and I can’t recall ever not coughing.  I honestly get to the point in week five where I cannot remember a point in time when I didn’t cough my way through the day and wake myself up coughing at night.  I acclimate to my new reality as Lifetime Cougher and accept my fate.  I even embrace the shreds of tissues bulging my pockets and the skateboard ramp’s worth of pillows on my bed as part of my life forever.  And then, miraculously, my cough goes away.  I say ‘my cough’ because by this time it has become a part of me, and though I try not to let it define me, it does.  Then eventually, I reach a moment in time when I can’t remember coughing.

At this point in the year, I can’t remember not being cold.  And cranky, and sure, okay, maybe just a teensy bit depressed.  And yet, I am hopeful-- but cautiously hopeful.  Like when I’m waiting for the dream job offer to come through.  It’s almost as if I don’t really believe it could happen to me.  I mean, spring is for the lucky ones, isn’t it?  Like slender ankles and personal chefs-- it’s for people more fortunate than I.  Or maybe I don’t want to believe spring will come so that I won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t arrive this year.  I suppose it could happen.  We could be bypassed.  Winter practically bypassed us last year; maybe it’s spring’s turn.

All of this makes me slightly miffed at the flowers poking through their crusty earthen shell when I should be over the moon.  “Look at you, Snowdrops,” I sneer at them as I walk through the icy slush up my driveway.  “You ninnies,” I say.  I can still see my breath.  “And you, crocuses, don’t be so daft.  You are way too soon, my friends.”  It’s as if they’ve arrived too early for a party that was cancelled.  I feel bad for them but am also wondering why they didn’t double check the evite before heading out the door.  And yet, they know a thing or two about a thing or two.  The flowers and forsythia have intel we can only dream about.  They know, without an iota of doubt, that spring is coming.  They are hopelessly optimistic and so I have no choice but to respect them.  Deeply.  I take back my slanderous jibes.  I beg their petals’ forgiveness.  Then, I relax a little.  Spring is coming, like the mail and grey hair.  I can bank on it, so I do, and this frees me up to enjoy the last vestiges of winter for it’s most glorious attribute: quiet. 

Spring, with all its allusions to rebirth, will bring with it the screaming wails of leaf blowers.  The dulcet tones of distant planes and falling snow will be replaced with the near-constant whinny of bands of roving landscapers, hired by homeowners who are—for the most part—not home to receive this daily aural barrage to the senses.  Napping children, stay-at-home moms and work-from-home-ers will be assaulted by this relentless grating, wondering how they inadvertently landed in houses purchased on the center median of a thousand lap Nascar race.  Then, when you can’t remember a time when there weren’t leaf blowers boring into your soul daily, they will stop.  And be replaced by lawn mowers and air conditioners. 

The near-constant throbbing grind of air conditioning units will blanket the bird’s song and the wind’s caress like a local oil refinery might, and follow us like inescapable tinnitus throughout our October days, when even the cool 65 degree night breezes won’t give them pause.  This seemingly final crescendo of leaf blowers and air conditioners will follow us right up until the end of November, when quiet will re-emerge once again.  Late autumn yards with gorgeous Japanese maples and oaks will preside over the naked, leaf-less lawns of Texas, bereft of the vestiges of why some of us chose the North East and not the desert in the first place.  It’s then that I’ll finally take out the earplugs that I’ve been wearing for seven months during the day and through out the night.  I’ll open my windows for a week or two before doing so would be like throwing heating oil money out the window.  By then, of course, the cicadas will have headed to Miami along with the blue jays, and the leaves will no longer be around for rustling. 

I get why people use landscapers’ leaf-blowers instead of raking, I suppose, and I turn on my own air conditioner at times.  I’m being a cranky hypocrite because winter has lasted so darn long this year and I’m just so ready for it to be over.  But, I will force myself to cherish its last few days.  I will strive to live in the present and enjoy the budding roses, the slow shedding of down coats and the calming effects of tranquility.  Because soon, before I know it, I will have forgotten what it sounds like.  I will have forgotten the exquisite peace of quiet.

The Savings Time

I love the arbitrariness of Daylight Savings Time.  Like national events that don’t really fall on certain presidents’ or civil rights activists’ actual birthdays, Daylight Savings Time has an almost legendary air.  It’s a fluid concept historically, one that ebbs and flows depending on the whims of those in power at any given moment—not unlike Turkmenistan’s first President for Life, who renamed all the months just because he could.  He renamed April after his sainted mother, Gurbansoltan.  He also re-named the days of the week.  My personal fave is Hosgun or Favorable Day, which used to be Wednesday.  Good luck booking a flight to Turkmenistan. 

I’m thinking of writing a thank-you note to 2005’s US Congress who passed the Energy Policy Act, which moved DST three weeks earlier beginning in 2007, from Gurbansoltan to Nowruz—formerly March-- and one week later to Sanjar—formerly November.  The theory was that we as a nation would use less energy to light and heat our homes if it were not so dark so early in the evening.  But, like the nation of rogues that we are, Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Arizona, don’t pay it no mind. “Feh, to Daylight Savings Time,” I can hear them collectively saying.  Although how one gets the top elected officials of Arizona and Samoa in a room together I’ll never know but I’d like to be a fly on the wall at that brunch.

I, for one, believe that Daylight Savings Time is misnamed.  Do we really feel like we’re ‘saving’ anything—really?  It’s like some parent has dressed up broccoli by calling them ‘tiny trees from Little Land’ in order to get us to eat our vegetables.  I don’t know about you but I’m asleep at 2am most nights.  But I am a saver by nature.  Why, just the other Favorable Day, I offered my girlfriend these super fancy Italian cookies to have with our tea when she stopped by.  Actually, I didn’t offer them, she discovered the large tin of Lazzaroni Amaretti Di Saronno cookies in the back of my uppermost shelf of my dry food cupboard.

She said, “What are these?  Oh, my goodness, I love these.  Can we eat these?”  She’s taller than me and doesn’t stand on ceremony.

“Sure, get them down,”  I said and opened the tin.  It was still half full.

“Are you saving these for some occasion?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you saving them for someone more worthy than me?”

“Clearly.  But since you were able to reach them, you are now worthy.”

My girlfriend reached in and chose one of the beautifully wrapped duets of cookies in the delicate pastel inscribed paper that sounds like rustling taffeta.  She unwrapped one and smelled it. 

“These are bad.”

“What?!” I said.  I loved these cookies.  They practically melted in my mouth—so subtle, so perfectly sweet with that touch of almond.  I was heartsick.

“We have to throw them out.”  She was right.  She added, “What were you waiting for?  You save too much.  Your life is passing you buy and meanwhile fancy Italian cookies are going bad right under your nose.  This is a crime.  You could literally be jailed for this in Italy.”

I was speechless.  All I could do was stare at all those tumbling little bundles as she shook them into the garbage.  Probably fifteen or so of them gone.  My girlfriend continued to lecture me like only a good friend can, “You’ve got to burn the fancy candles, eat the good cookies and spend the gift certificates.  This is your life.  Stop waiting for the right occasion or the right person to drop by.  You’re the right person and right now is the right occasion.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.  “I’ve got some champagne I’ve had chilling for about a year in the basement fridge, you want to pop it open?”

“It’s ten in the morning.”

“Right.  Good point,” I said, “I promise to eat the good cookies from now on.  And stop saving so much.” 

She was right, of course.  Maybe we should rename Daylight Savings Time.  Maybe we should call it Sleeptime Wasting Night.  Or Extra Christine Time, after my mother, the famous martyr.  Either way, it’s time that should be well spent-- like having an impromptu cup of tea with an old friend.

I sipped the warming tea then remembered something else I was saving.  I leaned down toward the floor and reached deep into the pots and pans cabinet and pulled out a bag of special treats.  Turning the clear zip-lock over for display, I said, “Please choose whatever you like.  There is no one more worthy than you, my dear friend.”  She rolled her eyes and shook her head then reached into the bag for a piece of my son’s Halloween candy.