April 30
Spring break-up now, the snow soft & thinning into a rhizomatic patchwork of puddle & brown runnel, & the tundra scrub peaking through the black dirt, tired & distended with water. & then come those waning hours of darkness, the stars become fugitive already, the windows covered over in the hope of some small night’s sleep. The bears already roaming at every altitude, the throngs of people already doing the same, & that perfect quiet of our winter opening again unto life & busyness & externality in all of its incarnations. It starts like that, a little bird-call, isolated that way, & then turns to the madrigal & the chorus & then that becomes the familiar ringing in your ear summerlong.
There is that attendant hesitation to participate, that part of me that doesn’t want to loosen my grasp on winter & all of its insular comforts. But we are animals, after all, & hibernation gives way to the pulse of things around us. & once the rotten snow recedes, I will have the dirt underfoot on runs, & that sweet, fecund smell of newly budding flora, & that strange familiar feeling of warm wind on my skin. & the dogs will forage & explore & tangle about one another as we go, & test the blueberries the season through until they are ripe (yes, our dogs have developed an absurd addiction to blueberry picking). & all around us, that enduring, thrumming sense of life & wakefulness, even while we try after sleeping, such that to lie with my eyes closed for a little while, with K’s hand on my chest, is as good as sleep.
You feel the life of things with a kind of wild desperation here, advertently or not; it tendrils & finds root room in you & clamors & tremors & takes hold of you until autumn has swept it over & it gives up the ghost again. The season is fully alive, itself constantly hyperphagic, ravenous in its unending appetite. I have never before encountered that particular sense of being predicated by living in a place with such sharply contrasted seasons—it’s difficult to describe the kinetic, lambent energy that seems to appertain in summer, & how boldly & relentlessly it declares itself at all hours compared to the slow whisper of our beloved winter. Plenty of folks prefer one to the other; I think I prefer to take the whole year as a discrete, book-ended unit, to think of it as a day itself in which we go about our diurnal patterns, wakeful under the light, hunkered down under the canopy of stars. It seems to make better sense up here.
& so to rise, wakeful, & step into it.
There is that attendant hesitation to participate, that part of me that doesn’t want to loosen my grasp on winter & all of its insular comforts. But we are animals, after all, & hibernation gives way to the pulse of things around us. & once the rotten snow recedes, I will have the dirt underfoot on runs, & that sweet, fecund smell of newly budding flora, & that strange familiar feeling of warm wind on my skin. & the dogs will forage & explore & tangle about one another as we go, & test the blueberries the season through until they are ripe (yes, our dogs have developed an absurd addiction to blueberry picking). & all around us, that enduring, thrumming sense of life & wakefulness, even while we try after sleeping, such that to lie with my eyes closed for a little while, with K’s hand on my chest, is as good as sleep.
You feel the life of things with a kind of wild desperation here, advertently or not; it tendrils & finds root room in you & clamors & tremors & takes hold of you until autumn has swept it over & it gives up the ghost again. The season is fully alive, itself constantly hyperphagic, ravenous in its unending appetite. I have never before encountered that particular sense of being predicated by living in a place with such sharply contrasted seasons—it’s difficult to describe the kinetic, lambent energy that seems to appertain in summer, & how boldly & relentlessly it declares itself at all hours compared to the slow whisper of our beloved winter. Plenty of folks prefer one to the other; I think I prefer to take the whole year as a discrete, book-ended unit, to think of it as a day itself in which we go about our diurnal patterns, wakeful under the light, hunkered down under the canopy of stars. It seems to make better sense up here.
& so to rise, wakeful, & step into it.
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