Last Bit of Winter

Spring has sprung. Or has it. Just kidding. It totally has and I have tiny white lantern snowdrops in my garden to prove it. But this is not a gardening story. Nay, the garden will have to wait. Until what? Well, since you asked I will tell you, but the answer is goofball at best. I would tell you it must be true because I read it in a book and not on the internet, but really it sounds more like Monty Python-penned myth than anything else. I have a slim volume on olde timey gardening lore, which explains the farmer’s foolproof method for telling when it’s planting time. You should probably pronounce time, “tahm”, in your head if this story is going to feel at all legit. And when I say farmers, think men in overalls and straw hats looking like eager background extras in a local cast production of Oklahoma. So, these farmers would wait until nighttime, drop their trousers and sit bare-arsed on the ground. If the ground was cold to the buttocks’ touch, then it wasn’t planting time yet. However, if that very farmer could drop his trousers and sit comfortably upon the warm earth, then, yes, it was time. Makes absolute sense to me. No, I haven’t tried it.

But, never say never—pun intended. I have other fish to fry. Like how I’m going to empty out the 30 gallon garbage can in my garbage hutch that’s filled with water. Seems the hutch lid was left up by a kindly waste management employee and it rained. A lot. Water filled all the way up to the very top then froze. So now it’s too heavy to lift up and out and can’t be tipped over—no room. I will have to lean over and down into the hutch, head first, and bail out the water now that it’s no longer frozen, trying not to lose my balance and fall, head first, into my garbage can like some cartoon. Come to think of it, I should probably have a spotter. At least it didn’t freeze with a bag of garbage encased in ice. That would be something.

Meanwhile, my son said goodbye to the snow the other day, or what was left of the white snow. He knelt down in our yard, patted it and kissed it goodbye. “See ya,” he said, “it was really fun having you around and I liked how you made everything so bright and cool looking. Plus the sledding was awesome.” I said, “Don’t forget the snow days,” and he said, “Oh, right,” and thanked the snow gods for all the luxurious time away from school. Then he picked up a piece and added it to the plastic cup in our freezer of snow left over from two winters ago. It’s melted a few times when the fridge has gone out, but still counts as snow in my book.

My guilty pleasure this spring will consist of seeing how long it takes the gigunda mountains of filthy snow at all the vast parking lots to melt. Will there still be tiny sooty vestiges of our wintry wonderland left at the end of April? Beginning of May? Some of those piles are mountainous and I imagine teen snowboarders in T-shirts sneaking out at night to hop on their boards one more time in the temperate Springtime air. I also love seeing what’s been buried under those piles all winter. Bits of trash, broken shovels, deflated balls, frozen in time like dinosaur fossils trapped in amber. There are only a scant few weekends left of quiet before the leaf blowers resume their aural assault and the garden explodes, begging for attention. I think I’ll spend them wrapping up indoor projects, picking up errant trash off the street, bailing out my garbage can and watching the black snow unceremoniously disappear.

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.

Hope Springs Eternal

I'm working on a book proposal, self-imposed deadline.
I'm writing all the live long day, yes, writing all the time.

My blog entry ideas pile up like unclaimed coat check stubs
Each corresponding to a story, makes me awf'ly troub'd.

I yearn to spend that ounce of time on posting to my blog,
But guilt abounds, the book cries out, my psyche do I flog.

Am I wasting all this time? Like time and time before?
The feature doc-u-men-ta-ry, short film, screenplays galore?

Is it all in vain, this writing, is it all for naught?
I 'spose I could just put down pencil, close the lid and stop.

But sneak I would to the computer, in the wee, wee hours,
Woken by my thoughts of nymphs beheaded by dark flowers.

So write I may as well and stockpile for a rainy day,
the stories that are brimming, seething with what I must say.

"Patience!," I call out to myself, anxious, full of ire.
Relax, you've days and days before ye, 'til you doth expire.

Your deadline's shrill song beckons as Shrew March's great thaw looms,
And with the garden, April's turn, another chance at blooms.