“In the spring,
at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
Margaret Atwood
It’s time to get dirty. All those
refined images of daffodil faces bobbing sweetly in the golden rays of spring
are all well and good, but I think it’s the grubbiness of this time of year
that strikes the note of truth. We’re
much too clean in winter. How do you get your fingernails dirty in December?
Certainly not shoveling snow, a clean job if ever there was one.
This is also the time when memory
and faith come into play, now when everything is so resolutely brown. Okay,
sure, there are the spots of green, but it’s a tired green, a green that is
shrunken and sparse after winter. The leaves on our front bushes are meager
indeed, having already had a pre-spring pruning by the hungry deer. And
although we raked in the fall, the winter collection of grayish leaves is
settled determinedly into all the flower beds. Clearing them out will be a challenging
task since we don’t want to tear up the few infinitesimal green shoots of
incoming crocuses.
Before the forsythia we have to spy
out the other signs of spring. This is the time of year when our sidewalks are
no longer pock-marked with patches of ice and mounds of snow. Now they become
schizophrenic with parkas, spring jackets, shorts, and running gear, all
sharing the same afternoon. The mounds of mulch unloaded by the railroad tracks
steaming in the cold morning air have grown from hills to mountains. The
finches, truly the most argumentative and disorganized of the bird world, are
transforming into bright jewels of red and yellow.
So we consider what to do with the
remainder of the wood and kindling stored in the garage to free up the
garden cart for other tasks, and decide to have one last fire, when using up
the winter fuel means outrunning the onset of warmer weather.
