Emergence
I am so off stride these last few days, waking up late after unrestful "sleep" as the nasoraptors prowl the aveolar caves and tracheal trees for prey. They come and they go, but even when they are gone, my mind and my hands are disjunct, cut off from one another, the supply lines severed by troop movements in the night.
The logistics of war make for lousy reading, so I am keeping my muddled thoughts confined to quarters. The poor muse is taking Universal Precautions--gloves, mask, and gown-- and so at the moment it is quite impossible to hear from her anything she might divulge on which to write. I hear only the sound of one lung wheezing, the Zen of the Rhinovirus. This, too, shall pass.
The warm sun yesterday was therapeutic for both of us. We spent a good bit of the day outside getting the wood-storing area ready for a new layer of gravel, there, and along the driveway this week coming up. We pried up the locust runners and small flat cinderblocks from the frozen muck. The stacks close to the house are gone now, used down to the ground. Those blocks and chunks and sticks of firewood blessed us with comfortable radiant heat over a hard winter, and now are reduced to only so much ash to show for all those years of hardwoods standing tall in the forest, and then two years segmented in the rank and file of human necessity.
After we get the gravel in, we'll put the runners back down and start rebuilding the woodpile for next year. Several cords of maple and hickory, oak and poplar are waiting over in the pasture where they have been stored in lengths, teepee-style, for almost a full year already. It will be good and dry come next September. And I have three large trees (two windfall, one power company line clearing victim) down and waiting to be bucked up into stovewood. I'm saving that work for when Ann's sisters come to visit in a couple of weeks. The estrogens will be so high for a while around here that a fella will want a place to go do manly work. Or pretend to.
The dog thought he'd died and gone to heaven with not one but TWO of his humans outside yesterday afternoon for the sole purpose of entertaining him, and of course, also to watch him show off by digging in the soggy sides of the branch like a dervish. Every piece of wood we moved out of the way was something for him to prance around with, taunting us to catch him. The more we organized the more he disorganized--cosmos chasing chaos on the small scale.
We saw our first butterfly flitting around in the low sun, its shadow appearing on the ground where we were working before we traced the angle back to find the frittilary overhead, fresh from a long winter nap under a rock overhang up on the ridgetop, perhaps. We reckoned that during the day we might find our first flower in bloom--a Coltsfoot, transplanted along the driveway where I'd been raking dead leaves away earlier in the day. Just as the sun sank behind the western ridge, I found the naked, leafless yellow bloom along the rock wall where the stones hold heat and speed up the bloom date by at least a week.
This morning, the first bluebird, calling from the highest branch of the maple across the road from the front porch, its chirping whistle unmistakable--a declarative, then an interrogative phrase in a nasal register. Where has this male been since we last heard from his kind in October? Perhaps just down mountain twenty miles from here--in Roanoke or Woolwine--where temps are ten degrees warmer and a few insects emerge on warmer winter days, providing a snack to tide the birds over until later. But even now, what will they eat until the insects get active again? Maybe the bluebird saw our fritillary butterfly yesterday and had him to dinner.
Keep your TheraFlu. Spring in these small doses are a homeopathic dilution of the season ahead, and more than enough tonic to chase away the dregs of a winter cold.
Comments
Fred - spring trumps winter once again, and trumps the flu, too.
Posted by: Tom Montag | February 29, 2004 8:52 AM
This was so beautifully written, with heavy doses of that usual wit and charm, and laced with tidbits of spring. How refreshing to hear the bluebirds sing, and enjoy Tsuga's chaos, and especially to see the yellow bud that clings to the warmth of the rocks. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: ntexas99 | February 29, 2004 1:39 PM
"The logistics of war" may have made reading tough for you, but I can't see they hurt your writing much - if anything, you have been writing even more engagingly than usual since you came down with the cold. So maybe you better just stay sick, then, for the sake of your readers?
O.K., bad joke, sorry!
What kind of fritillary? I am used to seeing mourning cloaks and Compton's tortoise shells at the equivalent point in our calendar; don't know that I've ever seen anything else. But your lepidopterae are considerably more diverse than Pennsylvania's, I suspect.
Posted by: Dave | February 29, 2004 3:02 PM
Today's post reminds me of the period in my life when I lived in Seaford, Virginia (1979-1985). We raised an organic garden, canned the produce and heated the whole house with wood I cut and bucked. My former wife worked in stained glass, and we called this "our Mother Earth phase." I ran up and down the country roads, sometimes as much as 50 miles a week. I'd come home and sit in the hot tub. This time of year, I would become obsessed with "cheating winter," which consisted of celebrating the warm days and taking weeklong vacation trips anywhere where it was warm. My life now is very much different, we follow our forks in the road, but I guess the point is to relish it all, as it happens.
Posted by: Denny | February 29, 2004 3:55 PM