Day and night balanced
Poised to tip the world into
Darkness or sunlight.
seasons
Ah…Spring…
There’s nothing like springtime…
…to make you realise how filthy the windows are.
Not quite warm enough to have them open, but nice enough that you want to look outside more frequently than you did in winter.
Like most people, I don’t particularly enjoy washing windows. But as cleaning jobs go, it’s one of the most rewarding. Who notices if there’s a little extra cat hair on the rug? But look out the window, and the fingerprints, grime, and mould of winter are painfully obvious.
Unfortunately, springtime is such a busy time for me, I don’t always have time to clean the windows. I have to be strategic about it. My office windows are the first to be cleaned—I spend all day in there, and dirty windows are particularly irritating.
Next are the kitchen windows—I like to look out while washing dishes, but not if there are streaks of bird poo on the windows.
Then come the dining room windows—who wants to look through grime while eating dinner, especially now that it’s light enough to see something outside at dinnertime?
Bedrooms, living room, bathroom…they can all wait—I don’t spend much time in any of those rooms during the day, and I don’t notice dirty windows at night. Maybe someone else will wash them if I don’t.
The Last Hurrah
We’re a week into spring, but winter wanted a farewell party, I suppose. The wind is howling and the rain falls sideways. Hail scatters like buckshot off the windows. The power has been out once already this evening, and we’re all expecting it to go off again.
But it’s September. We know this won’t last. We know that, no matter how cold the wind might blow, when the sun comes out tomorrow, it will be warm on our faces. We can, instead, enjoy the comforts of winter one last time—a blazing fire, a cup of tea, an excuse to do nothing but curl up with a book.
Farewell winter. See you next year.
Captive
The siren song of spring has taken me outdoors
Against my will…
Or not.
And so, I will not write today
I am in the garden.
I will not post a blog
I am weeding the strawberries.
I will not sweep the floors or clean the bathroom
I am turning soil.
I am unlikely, even
To worry about what to cook for dinner
Until it is too late to do anything
But the simplest meal.
I am in the clutches of sunshine
Lured away by birdsong
Captured by the earth.
Happy Spring!
I don’t need the calendar to tell me it’s spring. I know it’s spring because…
The daffodils are blooming.
The office is full of plants.
The fruit trees are budding up.
Artichokes!
The grass needs mowing.
The weeds are out of control.
The wind blows hard from the northwest.
The dandelions are blooming.
Crocuses to the Rescue
It was a long day. I was working in town. At the library. Trying to focus sitting next to a man who spent the day ripping pungent farts, then next to a pair having a loud business meeting. It was a spectacularly unproductive day. I went for groceries, and the store smelled of rotting fish. I sat in the hot car waiting for the kids, who were late getting out of their after-school activity.
With a splitting headache, I drove home, an hour later than I expected, and two hours later than I’d hoped. I took the route with fewer intersections, knowing my exhaustion and pounding head would throw my judgement off.
I got home (thankfully to find my husband was making dinner) and raced to do the afternoon chores before the light was gone. I was ready for some good rural silence, but the neighbour was ploughing next door, and the rumble of the tractor rattled my brain. Last thing I had to do was go collect the mail.
On the way to the mailbox, I saw the crocuses—the first of the year. They were as limp and spent as I was, but they made me smile. The rest of the unpleasant, frustrating day didn’t matter—the crocuses were enough.
When Summer Meets Winter
Early spring is an awkward time in my office. The office is used, not just for work, but also for sewing, crafts, and as a heated greenhouse.
In springtime, it can get awfully crowded in there.
I do a lot of sewing over winter, when the garden doesn’t demand so much of my time, and it’s not particularly pleasant outside. In summer, I do almost none—I have little free time, and my hands are so garden-rough that working with fabric is a lesson in frustration.
But in springtime, the two often overlap. My winter sewing list is always longer than I have time for, and I try to squeeze as many projects in as possible before I run out of time. That means I’m usually still frantically trying to finish the last project when it’s time to start vegetable seeds. The plant shelves go into the office and are filled with seedling trays while the sewing machine and iron are still set up.
It’s crowded, fabric invariably gets dirty, pins and scissors end up getting dropped on fragile seedlings.
Some day, maybe I’ll have a dedicated, heated greenhouse so that sewing and gardening can be separate. Until then, winter will rub shoulders with summer for a few weeks every year.
Sedgemere Haiku–Spring
In honour of National Poetry Day this Friday, the remainder of my posts this week will be in verse.
Fog billows in wet.
Frosting hair, spider webs, grass
With silver gilding.
_______
Magpie warbles loud
In early morning darkness,
Waking up the sun.
_______
Bees hum in purple
Lavender blooms, blue pollen
Dusting hairy backs.
_______
Seedlings defy frost,
Growing tall in warm sunshine,
Sheltered under glass.
_______
Sparrows descend to
Old sheds, bringing straw, grass, noise
Leaving poo, feathers.
_______
Ploughs plough, seagulls wheel
Overhead seeking
The freshly turned worm.
List It
See no evil–list it instead.
It’s about this time of year when I look around and see how shabby the garden looks. Through the depths of winter, I didn’t notice. I wasn’t outside enough. The days were short. I didn’t want to work outdoors.
But even if the lengthening days and singing magpies weren’t enough to tell me, the calendar is screaming that it’s just two weeks to spring.
So I’m paying more attention to the yard and garden. I’m taking a second glance at what I thought was my herbs beginning to resprout…and finding that the green I saw was actually a giant, aggressively spreading vetch. I’m walking through the vegetable garden to assess what needs to be done…and finding that though the chickens did a lovely job on some weeds, they didn’t touch the most difficult ones. I’m checking the bird netting over the strawberries, and finding hole after hole that needs repairing. I’m inspecting irrigation pipes, and finding ice-cracked valves. I’m walking the rows of currants and raspberries, and finding enough thistles to make me want to cry.
In short, I’m finding so many things to do, I begin to think I can’t possibly do them all.
And so, to maintain my sanity, I make lists.
A list of things to do this weekend.
A list of things to do in the evenings during the week.
A list of things to purchase in town.
A list of things to do next weekend.
A list of things to do the weekend after that.
A list of things that need to go on a list…
By mid-September, I’ll have every weekend through late-November planned in detail—exactly what needs to be done in order to have everything under control and planted out at the right time.
It sounds crazy, but it keeps me sane. Once a task is on a list, I can ignore it. I can walk past that aggressive vetch plant every day, knowing that if I just keep to my lists, I will eventually get to it. I can be completely blind to the holes in the bird netting, because I know that fixing it is on the list the week before the strawberries should start to ripen.
Without my lists, I’d be overwhelmed by the mountain of tasks to get done between now and December.
But the lists aren’t just good for making me get my work done. They also help me get my play in, too. Fun stuff goes on the lists, too. A weekend tramping trip, a day at the beach—I can schedule these things in alongside my work, and then actually enjoy them, because I know I’ve got time to do them. It says so, right on my lists.
Smell of a Memory
I was hanging up laundry early yesterday morning, when I caught a whiff of the past.
I don’t know where the smell came from, or whether it was even real, but there it was—the unmistakable smell of our house when we moved into it eleven years ago.
More than one previous owner ignored maintenance on the house. Today, I can’t believe we were so desperate to have bought it. The owners before us allowed the roof to leak, the toilet to leak, the piles and weatherboards to rot. They covered the smell of rotting carpets with air fresheners and sweet-smelling flowers.
The first thing we did, even before moving in, was to remove the carpets and air fresheners. Then I attacked the highly perfumed (and disgusting to my nose) flowering shrubs by the door.
We quickly improved the smell of the house (and fixed all those leaks and rotted bits), but it made a strong impression on me. On chilly winter mornings like the day we moved in, I can still smell those awful flowers.
Robinne Weiss 