Midwinter spring is its own season...

....There's a little Eliot for all you fans of Four Quartets. And as the good Thomas Stearns wrote about this season, "Between melting and freezing/ The soul's sap quivers." We have indeed landed in the season full of betweens. We wake one morning to hearty frost flowers and the next finds us hatless, tromping through melt and mud. Robins have joined the waxwings and, from time to time, I hear a honking overhead and find Canada geese passing high and away, tending north.

Today, the boys and I walked with some friends along the river. The trail was a patchwork of thawing snow, muddy ground, and gravelly patches. The northhills, lit against a deep slate sky, seemed straw colored, gold-like, rather than frosty, and all the red-twigged willow along the riverbank flared brightly. The soul's sap does seem to quiver in these days, reaching toward spring and all its attendant renewal. Though I love the winter palette and the snap of cold that makes me sit up and pay attention, I start feeling like an animal pacing its pen after awhile. The relentless melt and freeze, the sodden mud of the turning season demands a sort of amiability with transition that I can only sometimes muster. Our friend, Jack, calls this season Sprinter. And while indeed a unique hybrid, the name with its intimations of swiftness is a bit misleading. We had snow in June last year and not a freak storm but the tail end of months of near daily rain/snow/hail squalls, so perhaps this stretching, in between sort of season should be called Marathoner as it does indeed demand endurance.

The kids too are feeling the midwinter spring in their own ways. Seth clamors regularly to ride his new bike, a business which depends on me standing about on the sidewalk to push him every few meters. Thus, his riding and my having the time and mental clarity to stand in front of the house for half hours on end must coincide, and when they don't he stamps his feet and pulls at the door before turning to ride his indoor trike like a terror across the house.

Meanwhile, Corin, my perpetual nester, hunkers on our wide window seat, known in our house as the Owl's Nest, and plays CDs at full volume while coloring pictures of rocketships. At this point into our partial thaw, I could paper the boys' room and half the hall with rockets depicted in various space scenes (It's a rocket and the sun. It's a rocket and Jupiter. It's a rocket and Saturn. It's a rocket and Pluto [pronounced Plu-doo in this house]). Mostly I have been heartlessly papering the recycling bin. The other day, my mother called me from the far end of a closet cleaning project to ask if I wanted any of the artwork I had produced as a young child and which she had saved, lo, these thirty years. "Mother," I replied (horror cracking my voice), "Don't you dare."

But, whether or not the sun has come out to play, we try to pile out of the house, finding that any outing is good for us. Yesterday, the sun was gloriously out, and while the east coast was being pounded with snow, we had fifty-three degrees with high blue skies. The boys and I drove up to the local farm where Than works. We stood on hay bales listening to the pigs grunt around their slop, then walked the muddy two-track to the hoop house. Inside, 300 heritage breed chicks scuttled around heat lamps and water dispensers. Outside the chick nursery, a squadron of bees buzzed about the grain grinder, their dark bodies zigzagging near us before veering sharply away. Corin, hatless, coatless, and muddy-shoed, surveyed the bees like a man in a dream. When he caught me watching him, he smiled and said with a happy hush: "Just like summer!"

Hockey Guy

A game of chase in the North Hills


Out for a walk