summon spring!

is spring this stubborn every year? we’re still hovering in the 30s and walking across cold crusty snow.

i decided to bait the sun and the buds and the grass by dressing henry up in something fancy. i’ll let you know if it works.

the winter of our discontent

it’s been the sort of month where nothing is comfortable. my shoes pinch. my kitchen chairs squeak, rock, break apart. my toothbrush is mushy. my skin itches: it’s too tight, it’s not the right size, it doesn’t fit me, it cracks. i’ve been desperate to unzip and step outside myself, hand someone my heart and kidneys and ask them to watch them for a second, just a second, while i go somewhere else. anywhere else.

does it ever get to you like that? this everything? where you feel like every ribosome and mitochondrion inside of you is running amok? where you must get out or dry up like egyptian bones and sink into a lapis lazuli sky painted on the lid of your sarcophagus?

it gets to me.

there aren’t many solutions in the middle of a blizzard sodden cleveland. i did the best i could. i tied on my boots, found a scarf, and left. i didn’t pull a nora from ibsen’s a doll’s house, but i wanted to. i wondered how it would feel to just walk away from feeding people dinner and cleaning up smashed bits of everything from the carpet and chasing tiny hands away from the stove and never look back.

but all i did was walk. i walked through the evening that was sharp with snow and garlic, counting the things that i could change: the list was short and i felt like sinking into the snow at my feet and letting it bury me. i walked for a long time. breathing. pushing through the drifts. looking up into the blackness of the night.

and i saw something. it had bright eyes that flashed in the street lights. it was leaping through the drifts. a smallish cat, i thought. i watched it propel itself through the snow. leaping. pushing and pulling its paws through powder. almost graceful. and then i got close enough to see its tail, a long and hairless fleshy salmon pink. it was a rat. a giant rat hunting for shelter in the storm.

if rats can leap through blizzards…

february

i wonder if february is lonely. i wonder if that’s the reason she pulls the clouds down over her face for days at a time. i wonder if that’s why she hurls rain and sleet and slushy snow at the windows–usually late at night, pinging and banging at me curled in my flannel sheets. i wonder if her loneliness is behind the wind blasting up the street, raging through lines of garbage cans and shredding posters stuck to telephone poles, clawing at the earflaps of my hat.

i wonder if february’s angst at isolation tips on the borders of madness, making her poke and poke at me until i feel lonely too–lonely and smothered in a thick wool haze of crazy.

i need spring. maybe february does too …

3 days to Christmas

i love spring. when the crust of winter is split by crocus and snowdrops and daffodils. cardinals return to the trees, the males with their signature lusty song and the females with their rouged cheeks and pinked beaks. trees burst into flowers. the air is filled with the petals of the magnolia. the spring is as light as the winter is deep.

4 days to Christmas

there is a little space on the north end of mentor-on-the-lake on the lip of lake erie. a strip of grass. a porch swing stuck in cement. and sky, so much sky. for a little western claustrophobe like me, this is the only place in my dear ohio where i feel like i can breathe. long and deep. long and deep.