April 18, 2008

• Featured Grownups Challenge – Spring

  [Updated, with images from 4 years ago, when breakup came earlier.  This year, it is still winter out there, snow everywhere.]
  This is what “spring” means to me:

  

  It is where we get our water.  But I know that is not what the subject for the second featured_grownups challenge in April is supposed to be.  It is supposed to be about the season, the one that comes between winter and summer.  I am not going to be shut out of this challenge just because we don’t have a  season called “spring” here, leaving me unable to, as the boss-lady so eloquently put it, “Tell us what SPRING means to you… what is it you are waiting for, longing for, looking forward to?“

  I am waiting for breakup, the season that keeps the glorious Alaskan summer from slamming into the stark Alaskan winter.  Just because I’m waiting for it, that does not mean I am longing for it or looking forward to it.  I know it has to happen before summer can begin, but I am longing for it to just get here and get itself over with.

  I look out at the snow now, still deep in the yard and the forest, and all over the muskeg, and in big, dirty piles and berms all along the roadsides, and I must admit I am tired of snow.  I’m ready for winter to end.  But, no… NO, I am not looking forward to breakup.

  The only flowers that emerge in “spring” here are the ones on the trees, the pussywillows, and catkins on the birches, aspens, alders and poplars, that release pollen into the air but do nothing to improve the ambient fragrance of defrosting dog droppings. 

  There also will be pollen from the conifers:  spruce and hemlock, mostly.  It comes all at once, as if from a forest-wide conspiracy, and you can see clouds of it when a gust of wind wafts it off the branches.  It settles and floats in an orange scum on any bit of open water — where mosquitoes also breed.
  
  There is no pleasant anticipation in the thought of all the
  winter-killed dead things still frozen out there, and the animal
  droppings deposited throughout the winter, that will soon begin to
  thaw, rot, and stink.  But if I want summer, I have to live through
  breakup first.

  I’m longing for summer, looking forward to the midnight sun, and green
  things coming up out of the ground.  I don’t look forward to slogging
  through slush as the snow melts away, and I don’t eagerly anticipate
  what comes after the slush is melted. 

  I am not longing to have my feet
  sink up to the ankles in muck that wants to suck my boots off, but the
  only way I’ll avoid that is to stay in the house until the mud dries
  up, and I’m tired of being housebound.

  Breakup is the peak season for cabin fever.  Do you think of “cabin fever” as a sense of restlessness, an urge to get out and about?  That’s the mildest form of cabin fever, the kind people get in places where winter is less than eight months long.  We get that around here, too, but for some of us this season brings something more desperate.

  Cabin fever can be a true derangement. It sometimes expresses itself in violence amongst those who have been cooped up together since the snow came down in October.  We endure the cold and snow stoically, but when the world turns to muck around us after half a year of cold and dark, and summer is nothing more than a dim memory and a tantalizing hope, some of us snap.

  Any way you look at it, breakup isn’t pretty.  The only things that get me through it are the hopeful signs it brings that summer is on the way.  Days are longer.  It gets light around 5:30 now, and doesn’t get dark until about 10:30 at night.  I heard a crane a day or two ago.  It’s a little early for the big waterfowl, not enough open water yet for their feeding and breeding, but the vanguard is here and the rest will soon follow.

  The begonia hanging in my east window has its first flower of the year.  I think I can make it ’til summer, but no, I am not looking forward to breakup.
  

  • 9:52 pm
  • 34 Comments