Day 30
spring
Up here, Spring is like the slip of a strap from a shy girl’s shoulder. It seems almost accidental and after the most beautiful blush you ever did see, she turns and modestly pulls winter about her shoulders again. Weeks after the snow has melted in all but the most sheltered places, you can still feel the dry ice of it in the breeze. Sure, the birds are going at it, the pond is wet and shivering with the rise of fish and the business of ducks, geese, herons and cranes; the trees are tentatively greening, slowly enough that you look for it and look for it until you forget to look for it, thinking spring must still be a ways off. But then you look up one day, maybe through your binoculars which you have donned to decipher variations of finch at the bird feeder, and the aspen have gone green. The ice is drawn into the rivers which move down, with a muddy greed that takes as much as it can as it rushes headlong to the desert (the only hurried thing in this season.)
Like a bear from her den, you press out into the sunshine and realize you are starving. You want to eat everything in sight as you dig at the sleep in your eyes and make your clumsy way into the heat of the sun.
I am at home in this sleepy valley where spring drags on and summer is still a shimmering mirage in the distance. I am content to wear my sheepskin slippers a few more days and layer my sweatshirts and bask in the late afternoon hours when the sun has built up enough strength the heat the deck boards. I know from my childhood memories that early summer will feel like Spring prolonged; that Fall will be shouldering its way in by August. By the first of September I will be closing my eyes, trying to hold onto the bare body of summer that aroused me from my sleep in May.
