Spring in New England is always a mixed blessing. The crocuses break the soil in green spear tips and daffodils burst like new stars, but then the wind howls in the night and sleet squalls from gray skies. When you’re most desperate for it, new life begins to appear like forgotten magic, but it always takes its time, so much time. And the mud is everywhere.
It’s a hard season for me. The self imposed restfulness of winter begins to break up like ice on a river but it doesn’t leave as fast as I’d like it. Invariably, a few preternaturally warm days will roll in early in the season, just to gin up a bit of false hope. Even in early March, you might get out to do a little yard work in shirtsleeves, but snow is always a possibility, and even if it doesn’t snow the weather can be cruel. Before things have the common curtesy of getting better, they always seem to get a little worse first.
For one thing, spring reveals all of winter’s wounds, and then dares you to try to get out to fix them. The yard beneath the snow is littered with sticks and the dead leaves that you missed in the fall, everything as sodden and sickly looking as the remains of a rotisserie chicken thrown out a passing car window. You want to go out to clean and rake and reseed, but the ground squelches with every step and more often than not the wind is about fit to take the skin off your back. Sometimes you have to wait.
My own personal hell has been the flaps of the lawn torn up by the machinery of our recent fence installation. The treads of the skid-steer left chunks of sod flipped back like wounds, and I’m desperate to put them right, but I know it’s still been a little early for grass seed. Ruts from truck and tractor need leveling, broken limbs need chipping, wood needs splitting. A season’s worth of postponed work now reveals itself, begging for those warm perfect days that never seem to be today, not yet.
Everywhere there are signs of the wonder to come. Lilacs begin to bud, grass being its greening up, birds whistle back from their southern migrations. Soon, the robins will flock in the sunshine, and lilac blossoms will perfume the air, but first first comes the rebirth, and birth is a messy occasion. The peepers begin to call, and new life will fill the ponds and vernal pools with clots of frog-spawn. Its a time for slime molds and fungus, for living things in all their primal, repulsive glory. Before the flowers, you find the coyote scat filled with tiny a lattice work of mouse-bones left in the wake of the retreating snow.
Spring always puts me in a melancholic and pensive mood. The last few weeks before the world truly gets sweet can be the hardest to suffer, and waiting has never been my strong suite. The miseries of winter come with a certain calmness. But the miseries of spring are frenetic, all impatience and hunger, the desperation to get back outside and get back at it again. The mud is natural, the world needs the mud, but you hate the mud too, you hate the semi-solid transition from this to that. Maybe it’s a human condition, or maybe it’s simply me. I have been know to be something of a grump, particularly when coming out of hibernation. Still, I bide my time and claw at the walls and live with the imperfect mess of a half made season. I kick the last snow piles apart, and listen for the killdeer. I wait, and wait, and when the waiting about breaks me, the world will break out in beauty and all will be forgiven. But the waiting, as a wise man once said, is the hardest part.
The Edible Complex 