Hi DE,
I thought you might enjoy this little essay. I hope you're well. I know things are busy for you these days.
March 18, 2003
The Big Melt
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
I'd like to be able to hear the snow melting. A low whoosh would do, a sigh from the snowpack as it yields to the sun's insistence. I'd settle for a barely audible scream. The sound the snowmelt actually makes — the aural glittering of a dozen rills — is too diverting to suit my darker emotional needs. At our place, we had more than a hundred inches of snow this winter. It's not enough that it should melt. It should suffer as it melts. For the past five months I've walked back and forth to the barn over a sheet of polar ice. Now it groans as I step along it. I enjoy the sound. I send the horses up and down the ice sheet, then follow in the tractor. I'm breaking up winter while I have the chance.
Reports say that robins are near and that red-winged blackbirds have arrived only a few miles south of us. The snowdrops and aconites lurk somewhere under the sagging drifts. On Sunday — the first really warm day in months — the rain gauge in one of the garden beds suddenly reappeared, as if reporting for work. Plowed snow still stands in mountains all around us, looking more geographical than ever now, an Earth in miniature. Since the big melt began last weekend, those alps have broken apart into separate island continents, divided by a rising sea of gravel and matted sod.
I admire the animals we live with — their keenness, their toughness, the completeness of their sense of self. But what I really admire right now is their ability to shed. I stood in the barnyard the other evening with Nell, the mustang. She eats half of what the other horses do and hairs up twice as thick. She's been rolling fretfully in the snow for the past couple of weeks. When I scratched her back I came away with whole fistfuls of red horsehair. By the time I finished scratching, the ground around her looked like the linoleum under a draft-induction-barber's chair. She squared her legs so I could really lean into the work.
This is a time of year that makes me wish I could slough my skin entire, like a snake, just walk away from that old integument and step out new into the air. Humans thrive on the metaphors of rebirth and regeneration, and the trouble is that they're nearly always only metaphors. But it's the actuality of spring that overwhelms us. Every hour peels back another layer of snow and shrinks the dominion of ice. The ground gives, and the sap streams upward. The finches molt into their mating colors. I walk out among it all and find myself hoping to change with the season, too. |
