Equinox

Cabin fever medicine; Deb Marshall photo

Equinox 

20 March: 10 degrees out at noon, and a brisk breeze has blown all the birdseed off the wart rail, onto the well-piled-up snowbanks below.  By 4 pm we’re in a heat-wave: 26 degrees in full sun. Happy Spring – Ha! The weather gods are continuing to have their sport with us. My personal theory is that the awfulness of the weather can be measured in direct proportion to the number of New Englanders traveling south in an attempt to flee the last throes of winter – the more that go, the worse the weather is, and it’ll serve them right if their cars are snowed- and iced-in at the airport when they get back at midnight. They will get no sympathy from me.

At least it doesn’t look like we’re going to get the fourth nor’-easter in three weeks that we’ve been threatened with for the past few days. Good thing, too, because if we had another foot or more of snow dumped on us again, a number of us are just going to go back to bed for the duration – wake us up around this time next month. Or maybe in May. As my mother once said, gazing sadly out the back door at the giant pile of snow covering her garden, “Well, it doesn’t look like that’s going to melt in time to plant anything this year.” 

There’s an old folktale I read about years ago that says that in the norther regions of New England, old folks who can’t face another cold winter lie down sometime in early December and go into deep hibernation. The younger folks wait ‘til the oldsters are stiff and cold, then pile ‘em up in the barn shed and cover ‘em with a tarp for the winter, just like fire wood. Come spring, they haul the bodies back out into the sun and sooner or later the old folks thaw out and get up and go do chores, no worse for wear, and more rested and cheerier than the rest of the population. 

Waiting for a reason to exist; Deb Marshall photo

Even though it’s pretty frosty out today– or, as a schoolmate of mine who grew up in the town I now live in used to say, “It’s chum chilly,” the sun has meandered closer enough to our small ball of flying dirt and water that the snow on the south side of the roof is melting even in the below-freezing temperatures. The moat between the house on the south side and the raised beds has opened up yet again, though the raised beds are again covered with feets of snow. Dirt, and Catmandoo rolling in it, can be seen if you look closely enough.

It’s impossible to get to the compost bins again without wading knee-high through the stuff, but the cold temperatures have tightened up the mudhole we call a driveway enough so that we can drive over and flatten out the highest ridges of snowy mud/muddy snow, and we haven’t lost a car into the icy depths of the driveway pond yet. The UPS fella has taken to leaving our deliveries at the neighbor’s house, even so, and I don’t blame him – I didn’t make it to town meetin’ this year because I was seriously afraid that if I went out again that evening, I’d be trying to extricate my car from the mudhole at midnight, in the dark. Lose hope, all ye who venture here.

My Christmas cactuses are setting buds again – my Christmas cactuses seem to bloom only on Hallowe’en and on Easter, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that. Several of the orchids, which live in the west window of the dining room, far from the woodstove, are also setting buds. My calla lilies are producing some lovely large foliage, but there’s no sign of a flower bud this year. The Historian tells me he has a tomato plant about to blossom in his house, which is just fascinating, and will be even more so if it actually sets fruit. 

Window watchers - see the tall snowbanks in the background? Deb Marshall photo

We’re pretty much in full-blown cabin fever mode here. No one, two-legged or four-legged, is interested in eating anything I cook, and I’m not interested in cooking anything. Nothing we can find to watch on Netflix is interesting, and all books have lost their savor – I actually tossed one out today after reading only 150 pages of it. Sleeping has become a nightly battle – too cold, too hot, too cold, too hot, a constant removing and replacing and rearranging of bed clothes and blankets and not a lot of sleep happening. We snarl and hiss and bark at each other a lot, and at the office, I’ve managed to crack the giant window open an inch even though it’s too cold for it, because I just can’t bear to breathe stale winter air any longer. A few weeks ago, we were feeling pretty confident that the fire wood would take us through the end of the season; today, we’re not so sure. And the oil company just announced we’ve used a lot more of our prepaid oil than we’d contracted for.

And then there’s the news – best not to read it or listen to it unless you’re hoping for a shot of fiery adrenalin to wake you up out of the winter stupor. There hasn’t been another time in my lifetime when being a responsible citizen was so exhausting. Courage! Summer – and, we hope, some sort of sanity – will probably get here eventually.

For the blog alone, 20 March 2018: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com 

Winter menagerie; Deb Marshall photo