Spring, sprang, sprung

Spring arrived today, late as usual. I knew I should have clicked on express shipment, to heck with the extra $14.95 charge. The snow vanished and was replaced with a layer of water. I finally found my lawn, just where I left it last fall, it's always the last place you look! I also found a layer of doggie do that makes me wonder if the little guy is part pachyderm, not part terrier. The snow is gone, except on the river which is still frozen. There are huge pools of water on the river. Passing geese take a breather on these puddles, filling the air with their honking. A gaggle of 15 geese flew overhead, I watched them with my goggles, I giggled. They were flying in formation, but rather a half formation not a V but more of a backslash. I am sure that some Dot Com will figure a way to get them to spell out their web address. In any case they were welcome. I was barbecuing at the time. You might take this as a sign of spring but I barbecue all winter long. The only difference is that sane people next door can be seen barbecuing in the spring.

Flocks of snowbuntings have been appearing and already their feathers are mottled as they change from their winter white back into their dowdy summer brown. Too bad, they are so pretty and so invisible in the snow. Now they will be invisible in the mud. Still I guess that is better than being invisible in some predator's belly were the color change reversed. They filled the power lines beside my house bringing to mind the lyric "Like a bird on a wire." by Leonard Cohen. I could hear his fog horn voice in my head.

Spring comes suddenly in the north. Explosively really. Winter is so long here that you think it is never going to end. Then one day, as you stand in a window looking out over the snowy winter world, you feel it. It dawns on you subtlety, "what is that sensation?" you ask yourself. All winter long the sun has only appeared briefly, tentatively, like a younger brother sneaking down to get a snack from the kitchen hours after being sent to bed. It serves merely to draw attention to the snow and the cold. But now it is having an effect on you, your skin feels funny, tingly, warm, WARM, WARM, WARM! It hits you slowly but surely, THE SUN IS WARM! Spring is here your brain says to your body. It lowers its' defenses and prepares to drink in the phenomenon. You step out on your deck, in slippers and PJs. Prepared to be enveloped in a blanket of warmth from that distant yellow orb which had until today been so lazy, so asleep on the job. As soon as your bare, slippered foot, hits the deck with its generous topping of frozen snow, you realize that you have made a horrible mistake. The icy wind hits you like a corn dog in a blast freezer. You feel like you have been dipped in liquid nitrogen and you fear that your fingers will break off when you grab the door handle like the banana your chemistry teacher shattered in high school. You turn sharply, resolutely and walk back into the house, embarrassed that you have been fooled. Like a kid ordering the x-ray glasses from the back of a Beetle Bailey comic. I stand in my living room shaking. My wife walks in, she looks at me and says, in her matter of fact, sensible voice "What are you doing going out in your pajamas when it is twenty below?" I try to offer a defense. I try to voice my rapture in the first heat of the spring Sun. I try to explain the primal effect of the warm sun on the hippocampus, how it triggers some innate urges that are lost in the mists of evolution. Instead my thoughts are lost in a chattering of teeth and a staccato babble of unintelligible syllables that escapes my mouth. She leaves the room, further convinced, as if she needed it, that I am mental. I feel like a hippo on campus.

Anyways, that was then this is now. The sun is shining and the nasty old winter has gone away, retreated to its' snowy lair not to return for weeks. Believe it or not I have lived a year where it snowed every month of the year. Even in JULY! It was while I lived in Old Crow north of the arctic circle. But today such things are banished from my mind, today I am enjoying, nay, savoring the spring. Like a gourmand at an all you van eat buffet, I am loading my plate. I am stacking scoops of sunshine on a lettuce bed of the smell of thawing earth and dust, yes even dust smells good to me today. Today I will walk the banks of the MacKenzie, I will gaze at the distant mountains their heads still capped by toques of snow and I shall enjoy the fleeting feel spring, all too brief here in the land of the soon to be twenty four hour day. Where summer will bloom in but a couple of weeks and where too, sadly, autumn will fall like the final curtain in the not too distant September morn. Now I hear the dulcet tones of Neil Diamond singing "September Morn". I shake my head, I want to be like the Buddhists and stay in the moment. I love spring, spreading out before me like an empty page, an unwritten story of summer. I want to linger over every line and pay no heed to its' ending, not now when spring is still a promise that lies unbroken...