Spring is ambling towards us – ever so slowly but eventually it’ll be here and I think about how it feels – finally. Here’s an excerpt from my book, “The Domestic Archaeologist” – thoughts on Spring: Enjoy…
Spring in the northern latitudes is filled with a sudden pleasantness. It’s heralded by a collective unpuckering, when, all at once, people sense that the last bit of brrrr has been unceremoniously ushered out the door. A sweet mildness descends, and it’s followed by an awareness that the equinoctial days are as long as the tepid nights.
While March is filled with more tricks than a clown’s pocket, April, ah, April, has hope. It may toss a slush-ball in our face, just to be pesky, but at least we have hope. We know the odds are on our side. Weeks earlier, we cranked the clocks forward like impatient time travellers praying we could also rush the thaw. When spring shows up in earnest, we set aside any dirty suspicions of winter’s trickery, depopulate the car of war-weary ice scrapers, bag the snow tires, unclench our arthritic grips from our lapels, and preen for the sun like ambulatory solar panels. Unfettered by head wrappings and snotcicles, we are aware of 360-degree vistas. When the alarm clock stutters us awake each morning, we linger horizontal that wee bit longer just to listen to the sweet clatter of birdsong.
Signs of reawakening abound. Neighbours appear like squinting moles to tip-toe squelch into their backyards to pluck errant newspapers from bushes or unshroud the patio furniture and the sleeping barbecue. They squeak open windows, desperate to let their daughter’s poor choice in music out or replenish the air supply in the mouldy vacuum that is their son’s room.
More than anything else, thoughts of renewal and reinvention invade our spring craniums. The expression “spring forward” fills the air with possibility that a new, better journey is about to begin or that projects stalled may yet become projects achieved.