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As I lay in bed this morning the view through the skylight above me was a happy surprise. It was the first time I had noticed the slightest hint of color in the nearby treetops. Hurrah!
It is that lovely “in between” time of year for me; the time when Summer gives way to the first few wisps of Fall. The days have been warm. Evenings have cooled to “sweater weather”. Summer flowers still grace my yard and trees are just starting to turn colors.
I’m aware that my tastes in weather are a bit contrary. I get that, for most, Spring brings a sense of hope, the promise of sunshine and new blooms, yada, yada, yada, but the reality of Spring always strikes me as grotesque. Spring in the Northeast is gray and muddy. The grass is still brown. The earth is coated with the scum left behind by melting snow. The bare trees that looked stark and beautiful against a snow-covered backdrop, look a bit pathetic in the new light of Spring.
By contrast, in the advent of Fall, the sky is blue, the grass is lush and green (it ought to be after nearly 6 inches of rain in the last month) and my garden is thriving in the respite from the oppressive Summer heat. My months of tending are beginning to pay off as tomatoes and beans ripen on their vines. Yellow school buses have begun their morning and afternoon rounds, and team colors can be seen on the young players that practice on the local fields.
I know other will view these shortening days as the harbinger of doom, but it’s hard to argue that the view from my kitchen window isn’t just a little bit heartening.
At sea level, or the close approximation of it that most of us live in, sound travels at about 760 miles per hour; slightly slower at higher altitude as the less dense medium is less efficient in transmitting sound waves.
I don’t know about you, but I find 760 miles per hour a bit of a conceptual stretch. I know folks who have traveled that fast, but Mach 1 or higher is outside of my personal experience. To put it in terms that are perhaps a little more down to earth; sound will travel about 0.21 miles in a second.
Light travels at the 186, 000 miles per second or something on the order of 670 million miles an hour, which would be, you know, faster. In fact, for everything other than intergalactic travel we consider light travel to be, for all practical purposes, instant.
“This is important to me, why?” you are probably asking.
To be honest I can’t answer why it might be important to you. For me, though, I am nearly giddy in anticipation of the season’s first thunderstorm.
One potato. Two potato…
Spring in upstate New York is, shall we say, “changeable”.
Yesterday was sunny and mid-40′s. Today is gray and snowing.
This is not unusual. We had snow fall as late as May last year. It’s not unheard of to have a few snow flurries in June. I have vivid memories of Easter egg hunts out in six inches of fresh snow.
At this point in the season, though, most folks I know have had enough of the white stuff for the year and they are ready for shorts and barbecue. I am never ready for shorts and don’t require sunshine for barbecue. They are raging at the snow like it is some personal affront; some global climate conspiracy to drive them mad. I am counting the flakes as a blessing; a reprieve from the coming heat.
Even with flakes in the air I am cursing the filthy paws. Already, I am burdened by the debate over whether to shampoo the carpets now or wait till the mud stops (aka: November). Other households with dogs seem thrilled by the coming of Spring. I don’t get it. I could long sing the praises of frozen poop and mud-free paws.
Even before the beast, I was not such a big fan of this time of year. The end of Winter and rising temperatures depress me, like the final days of Summer depress “normal” people.
I suffer alone, though, as the rest of the world celebrates.
Maybe, in time, when the puddles recede, but before the grass needs mowing, I may find a little joy. I may learn to love the Spring-time.
I doubt it, though.
Yesterday marked the first official day of Spring.
It is snowing, and not just a little…
Given the fact that it could be raining, I could be sinking ankle-deep in mud in my back yard, or I could be contemplating having to mow the lawn, I’ll celebrate today’s weather as “the best a girl can hope for”.
The rest of y’all can celebrate having a lunatic as a friend, I suppose.
A number of friends have expressed some concern that I am going to Alaska in the middle of March. As a point of fact, the National Weather Service is reporting the current temperature in Anchorage as 34 degrees. The thermometer outside my window is reading 19.
My own personal concerns tend more toward whether my current wardrobe will be clean than whether or not it will be appropriate for the climate.
Accordingly, I have spent the day attempting to lure the laundry fairy into my humble abode. Apparently there must be some kind of international laundry crisis, as my Siren’s call has yet to be heeded. The laundry is, yet, undone.
And so my suitcase remains unpacked.
Ack.
I find myself, not so much, world-weary, as travel weary, even before the trip has begun, and the suitcase has become emblematic of the pre-travel to-do list; a symbol of all that is uncertain, dreaded, in need of laundering, lugged, tracked down. It is also the receptacle of the post-vacation backlog. At great effort do we haul the next two loads of laundry home with us.
Uncertain of how the week’s schedule will unfold, I don’t know whether to pack snowboots or cowboy boots; dog treats or ramen noodles; a good book or a good leash. I am busy second guessing my decision not to rent a car. I’m a little worried that I continue to get emails for a volunteer position for which I did not sign up.
I have to keep reminding myself that I am going because I have never seen it before…I’m supposed to be surprised.
That said, and unpacked as I am, I am ridiculously excited about my impending Iditarod adventure. I have spent the day looking at a flyover video of the trail in Google Earth and attempting to memorize the checkpoints. I have re-read the musher listing and the course rules, and bookmarked the link to Zuma’s Paw Prints, one of the canine reporters for the event.
Last night I printed my work schedule.
I am listed as a rookie.
Which makes me giggle.
Whether you are an evolutionist, and believe that all of life crawled out of the sea a gazillion years ago, or not; most of us believe that water is essential to all life. We are schooled in the risks of dehydration, cheerfully reminded that we need 8 glasses a day to remain healthy, beseechingly asked to help some areas of the world develop purification and distribution systems to sustain villages.
Short of air to breathe, water is probably life’s most essential need.
Unless, of course, you are a homeowner, at which point you will be forced to admit that water is the bane of your very existence.
My day started with a meeting with the management company for the condo I own. It was yet another in a series of meetings I have attended over the last five years to discuss the roof leak. I have little hope that it will be the last.
Returning home I spent about 20 minutes hacking a channel through the ice at the apron of my driveway to give the run-off from melting snow a place to go. It might have been satisfying, but for the fact that in order to complete the task I stood ankle-deep in 32-degree water, but it was that or bail the water out of my basement at some later date.
Other errands today included a trip to the hardware store. I went to get a key copied but thought I might as well buy drop cloths so that I can finish repainting ceilings. The ceilings required patching after the roof of my house was replaced a few years ago. The roof, of course, had to be replaced because it leaked like a sieve the weekend I moved in.
Finally returning home this evening, I discovered that melting snow has been flooding my garage. Though only an inch or so deep, my previously dry garage lacks a drain, so the excess water had to be swept out the door – no mean feat in a garage that contains remnants of three households, my garden tools and someone else’s boat. Fortunately my shoes were still wet from previous endeavors, so there was no real harm done.
So, for today, I have been dealing with the effects of water, water, everywhere. While I live with all the modern conveniences, and there is, indeed, a drop to drink, I will be well shy of my 64 ounce daily requirement. I’ve switched to drinking something slightly drier.
I went out to dinner last night with a friend of mine from my old neighborhood. He was driving, but since we were starting off from my house I was navigating us through the back roads near my house in order to save us from having to backtrack into the city again before heading off to the tiny town where we would be eating.
Leaving the house well after 6 p.m. in light snow, the roads had potential for slick spots, and, especially heading away from the city, much of the route was poorly illuminated. It was one of those nights where I was happy not to be driving, although to be fair, as the only driver in my household, I, frankly, enjoy being the passenger whenever I can.
I wasn’t perhaps the best passenger last night, though.
My dinner partner and the driver for the evening was happily engaged in recounting some event or another. I kept interrupting.
“We’re going to take a right at the bottom of the hill.”
He put on his blinker and continued with the story.
“If you see where that car just turned, we’re going to follow him.”
Another lane change and then more of the tale was narrated.
“We’re going to go straight through the stop-sign ahead,” I said.
”Is it OK if I stop at it first?”
He sounded annoyed.
OK… so maybe I could have improved upon my choice of words, but my inner voice reminded me that he truly did not know where he was. To my way of thinking I had been doing an excellent job of telling him how to get where we were going, without, I thought, telling him how to drive. Yet feeling chastised a bit (now this is one of the true gifts of being raised Catholic, I can feel like I have been disciplined without a single cross word being said), I decided to keep quiet and let the man finish his story.
And so he continued, until I felt the need to interrupt yet again.
“Dear,” is what he heard me say next.
He looked at me.
“Dear,” again.
“Yes, Ellen”
“DEER!!!!!”
And looming in the headlights were three very large deer in the middle of the road. Fortunately, we slowed in time for them to leap away. Fortunately, the road at that particular spot was relatively dry. Fortunately, we lived to hear the rest of the story.
Except that he didn’t finish the story.
He looked at me, instead, and suggested that next time I should yell “moose”.
Before I start into today’s case of the poor-pitiful-me’s, I should clarify that I am fine, my life is good and I am grateful for many blessings.
That said, I’m having one of those days where my mind goes toward carjackings while stopped at a light in a perfectly respectable neighborhood, where I wish I could be one of those people who stops paying her association dues until the condo association stops the leak in the condo roof, where a trip to the garden store for hyacinth bulbs has me nearly in tears over the memory of my mother’s beautiful gardens.
In truth, it is probably just an off day…or maybe hormones…or maybe the nagging headache that I seem to have had for days. It seems, however, to all stem from the “S”-words.
I am supremely frustrated that people are grumbling over a little snow in the forecast while I am trying to quell the rising panic that soon temps will rise, the melting snow will flood my basement, turn my yard into a mud pit and expose the winter’s worth of land mines left by the beast. Once through that lovely phase, I’ll have to start mowing the lawn and shaving my legs again. I don’t want to pick up the sh!#, and I seriously don’t want to wear shorts…ever.
I have a deep-seated and very real fear of Spring, and, I might add, the whole world is incredibly insensitive to it.
Furthermore, the beast had her annual physical this afternoon. She is overall as healthy as she is happy and energetic. We were in for her annual heartworm check and a vaccine booster, but the vet, being thorough, was following up on some chronic issues and somehow another “S”- word came up in the conversation.
Surgery.
Now the vet was by no means pushing radical procedures for what have, so far, been manageable conditions, but, in the interest of educating me and walking me through all the possible treatment options, the “S” word came up…twice… both to correct the long-standing issue with the beast’s goopy eyes and as a possibility if her occasionally gimpy hind leg worsens.
I’m not a fan of surgery. In college, with chronically inflamed knees and a stomach that was becoming increasingly sensitive to painkillers, I walked away from knee-surgery just days before I was supposed to go under the knife. At the very last consultation with the surgeon, his assistant noted that “if the left knee goes OK we could do the right in the Spring”. I decided I was walking well-enough without either knee being sliced open.
I’ve never been under anesthesia, and I don’t want to ever try it. I am imposing my same reluctance on the beast; even to the point of backing away from diagnostic techniques, because even to x-ray her knee and hip she will have to be sedated…another “S” word.
So, yes, my life is good right now, but it would be better without the “S” words…or the headache…
Local senior living communities have been hard hit by the economic downturns. Staff downsizing has led to new distribution of labor and has required residents, by way of occupational therapy, to perform previously outsourced tasks.
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