Category Archives: springtime

where i’m calling from

spring has arrived with both feet, finally, and although i have been completely enjoying the lush green, the ever-changing sky, and the mild weather, i have also been completely walloped with some sort of sinus issue. i’m not typically prone to seasonal allergies but all the news reports have been full of dire warnings about an especially horrible year for that kind of thing, due to our extremely cold winter (they even have a snazzy nickname for it – ‘ALLERGEDDON‘). i have yet to find any kind of med that addresses it without leaving me comatose yet waking up every morning with my face glued to my pillow is even grossing out emmett and sarge, and they have a high tolerance for that sort of thing.

in other exciting news, we have a new houseguest.

mommy duck (apologies for our lack of cleverness in naming) arrived on mother’s day. i was in the front yard when she and her husband (or boyfriend, who am i to judge) made a flopsy near-crash landing. her partner waddled across the street and stood in the shade of a flowering tree, looking annoyed, and she huddled at the foot of our birdbath for awhile. later, when i went out to continue unpacking the car from that weekend’s journeys, she had taken up residence in a corner of our garden behind a bush, quite near to the front door. she has since laid six eggs, and every day the nest is banked up a bit more, a neat mound of mulch and soft pinfeathers. i worried for awhile about her eating, and tried to leave her some food, but bread isn’t a good alternative for ducks, contrary to popular myth, and she ignored the millet. the red squirrels and chipmunks stole her cracked corn, and brought out her tail-fanning-hissing mode, so i have had to be content with leaving her a dish of water which she may or may not be partaking in.

all i know is that every evening around dusk she carefully covers her eggs, then tiptoes down the walk and flies away. we wait with bated breath until we know she is waddling back up to the porch and safely home.

our suburban yard is full of life. the boy hummingbird is back and although he is skittish, vastly more skittish than the hummers we had last summer, every now and then we catch a glimpse. i’ve learned how to mow the lawn, although i still have problems with the pull cord on the mower, and there are a lot of other encouraging things going on behind the scenes that i can’t talk about (won’t, actually) due to the whole personal life thing. but life is pretty okay right now, and would be much better if i could just master my triangle of death.

one long digression

I had a couple of hours to kill while my bread dough rose (I am trying Jane Brocket’s bread recipe from ‘Simple Art of Domesticity’; I have tried it before but didn’t realize I had an uncorrected copy of the book with several recipe mistakes in it owing to the conversion between metric / standard measuring, and the bread came out like a dense salty rock. Loving Jane Brocket, I am giving it another go with the corrected recipe. Even if it doesn’t turn out, there isn’t much better than the smell of baking bread in the house).

I digress.

I decided to go running. I’m easing back into a more aggressive running schedule, wearing embarrassing calf sleeves to avoid my typical scourge of springtime shin splints. My running friends are all quite a bit ahead of me, already turning in fast times in events and sporting new running ensembles. This makes the competitive “what about me” part of my brain very anxious indeed. I like to think I am one of those people who feels good for my friends and proud of their accomplishments when they do better than me and that I can say graciously, “I’m only competing against myself” and to be fair, that is how I strive to be, and those are all the things I say OUT LOUD. Inside, though, I have to squash a feeling of dissatisfaction when I feel outdone, and it makes me not proud to say it about myself. But being competitive only makes me not want to run at all, oddly. I only run well when I run for love, and so I have to trick myself with encouraging words and the promise of photography to get my running shoes on when I am in this mode, otherwise I will stay inside and watch Netflix and feel gloomy and guilty whenever my gaze lands on my Mizunos.

I spend a lot of my time trying to outfox myself, it’s kind of exhausting.

I ran on the trails, which is Strictly Prohibited, and I got a lot of dirty looks from the casual ambling Sunday morning birders in their big hats and hiking boots, toting their enormous-lensed cameras; but I went along anyway, and didn’t feel very bad about it. I don’t think it hurts anyone, I’m a polite runner. Anyway, I thought, they can catch me if they want to stop me, and I put on a showoff bit of speed up a hill and then winded myself and had to walk for awhile, feeling slightly foolish.

Trail running is harder than normal street running, uneven ground and lots of elevation changes, so I didn’t care about my time, just being outside. We are a bit behind in our greenery, but it is there, the woods are coming alive with it. Red-winged blackbirds – my favorite springtime bird – sang their bubbling, burbling song in the reeds, the sun turning their black feathers glossy. The wind was up in the trees and clouds blowing a gale, it was one of those spring days when the sun comes out and is so warm that you feel like you could curl up in a warm patch of grass and fall asleep quite cozily; but then a dark cloud is driven across it and the world falls cold and chilly, and your nose starts to run. It was the kind of day where you run and walk and run and walk and you get back to your car and all you want is a hot shower and a hot cup of coffee and everything is happy, sunshine and shadow.

At the end of my run, I came across a couple of others to share the path with. The turkey, looking fat and brilliant in the nice light, edged past me and ran on frantically, no doubt sensing the word DRUMSTICK as it swirled through my brain. The sandhill crane, however, was unbothered; he groomed himself carefully and surveyed me with a blank golden eye, and caused ME to edge by, no longer sure that I couldn’t be caught if I tried to run.

spring malaise

“Perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unaddressed business of filling our souls.” – Lee Stringer

I have a spring cold, and all of the suddenly nice days have made me perhaps a little depressed too. I know, I’m contrary. Worst winter of the decade, I’m fairly chipper, give me some sunshine and pollen and it brings me to my knees. I think it’s partially the uneasy feeling that I should be doing something that I’m not or enjoying the sunshine or riding a dappled pony through a field of daffodils or doing a triathlon instead of what I’m actually doing, which is usually sitting on the couch.

Some days there’s nothing for it except rest, and fresh food, and maybe flowers. I’ve also spent a fair bit of time on the couch with Season 6 of ‘Mad Men’ (and coincidentally, recently found January Jones has an Instagram feed, and if you can get past the endless parade of absolutely spectacular selfies, her hashtagging and commentary is pretty funny and clever).

I don’t get sick very often but when I do, I am a miserable human being to be around, disheveled and bleary and endlessly contaminating shared surfaces. So it’s nice to have one little soul in the world who can tolerate me at my worst. (As much as I love it, my neti pot does not have a soul, so it doesn’t count.)

It used to be Grey Cat, and I have been blessed by whatever benevolent wind blows around this universe to have found another.

Emmett, of course, in his softer moments when he is not trying to escape from Alcatraz or knock pictures off the walls or swing on my Japanese lantern or tear his litterbox apart or find some birds to chew on.

#thisiswhywecanthavenicethings

(suck it, January).

in like a lion, out like a – well, a lion.

it’s april 5 and last night we had a fire in the fireplace and the wind howled around the eaves. there were two nice days last week and i got out and ran on one of them, 4 miles at lunchtime in a chill windy sun. i love the sound of the red-winged blackbirds swaying in the reeds. i run down and around and up, over thawing mud studded with deer prints, curious bones being churned up in the roadside thaw, past fallen trees and a tiny mirrored pond that in the summertime will have a turtle sunning itself. then i come back and see the office building and slink between all the polite cars in the parking lot, smelling like a wet dog, blowing and sweating and still half-wild. it’s like my alter-ego, and i come back and shower and put my work clothes back on and sneak back to my office, feeling rebellious and pleased and only slightly apologetic.

every day that we see the sun, i try to get us outside, especially on weekends. i like this teetering on the edge of the spring precipice, oddly, because i know once the balance tips over things will go fast, the warmth and green will come in fast forward and before i know it be full summer, blooming towards ripeness and rot.