FEINTS AT SPRING

This time of year I’m always a little confused. Like the weather. Like the long skeins of geese that have been sculling the skies, looking for open water. Today it’s here, tomorrow it’s there. It may be only folk legend, but it seems as though many old timers slide away about now, so that the obituaries are listing ranchers more than a hundred years old, which means they were born before World War I.

This year the farmers are checking their winter wheat without a lot of hope since there has been so little moisture, so little snow to cover it with insulation. Last year was so wet and now this year is so dry. The great scythe of weather swings back and forth, changing everything and confounding any sense of whether the global weather is warming or cooling or simply chaotic. We watch the sky for signs of the jet stream.

I have a cardboard box of sweetgrass I cut from the bed I grow in my back yard. Originally I brought it into the house to dry, putting it up high where the heat collects, but then I forgot it except for occasionally noticing the sachet effect. Then last week I had occasion to give a handful to a friend and send another handful to my cousin. I meant to make conventional braids, the way one buys sweetgrass in a shop, but I never got around to it so I just bound the clutch with yarn. There were a lot of things I never quite got around to this winter. I’m not domestic in the best of times and when distracted, I let things slide. Squibbie, the tortoiseshell cat, has taken to sleeping in the box of sweetgrass, maybe dreaming of summer. Crackers, the yellow cat, likes to chew what sticks out over the flaps. I pick up the strands the cats leave on the carpet and throw them onto the stove burners to make smudge when I boil water for coffee.

The librarian explains to me why people like to ice fish. She says you can see the fish down there. The little perch like to rest on the bottom on their fins but then you see a boil-up cloud of dust (underwater?) and they’re all gone. In a second the menacing shadow head of a really big fish (I don’t know the kind) comes along like a shark. This is the kind you catch by using a mouse for bait. The man who was once in Special Forces and who was writing a book this winter just for fun has stopped writing because, he says, he must get ready for fishing season. (He doesn’t fish for ice. Jokes.)

My friends are watching this season’s “Downton Abbey” but I don’t have television. When it’s on DVD, I’ll catch up. In the meantime, I forward them the many peripheral articles because they don’t subscribe to culture compendiums. A recent one of these said that in the huge house where they film, old things constantly turn up in drawers or at the backs of cupboards. They just now found an entire staircase. I suppose it had been walled up or the access door had been locked. This is supposed to be a classic woman’s dream: a hidden space revealed, especially the one the girl ascends to find the old woman spinning. The girl becomes the sleeping beauty. George Macdonald, writer of fairy tales, added the catacombs of ancient mines in the mountain under the castle. Down there the trolls jostle Curdy, the miner, who knows he can defeat trolls by stamping on their tender toes.

When I have this dream, I’m in a grist mill where flour is ground and the stairs are open, going up among the timbers, all laden with chaff. The sound of the mill is so vivid that I wake up. It is a diesel truck idling across the street, warming up for a day of hauling. It has snowed a few inches that will be gone by noon. One cat behind my knees, the other on my left arm. One snores, the other purrs.

The dregs of February. Do we leap this year? No Marching yet. The calves and lambs are coming. It’s a little past shearing season. In Portland, where I grew up, it’s spring with pussywillows and forsythia. In Chicago, where I was educated, the red cardinals have changed to their pairing-off songs. Here in Montana the ground squirrels are pregnant but rolled up sleeping in their burrows. The bear cubs have been nursing but maybe their eyes are still closed. Their mother shifts a little now and then.

I have a friend to educate. “What is a rhizome?” he asks. “What is a minotaur?” “How do you find sweetgrass?” He’s Rip Van Winkle, newly retired, his eyes wide.

Those are not the questions I’m asking. I’m wondering, “How does a person manage desire? How much of it is history?” “Why are people comforted by denial?” “Why do people in dire straits want to be alone?” (I would.) “What is gender really?” “When is spring? Not just the angle of the axis of the earth, but as a subjective experience, that realization of having made it through the winter?” My questions are complex and always lead to new questions.

I should do some housekeeping. Vacuum. Pay some bills. Wash the dishes. Straighten the pictures on the wall. Reshelve books. Wash the cat dishes. Sort and file the toppling stacks of paper.

This morning the sky was blue and the sun was bright gold. Now it’s back to gray and the mountains are shrouded again. Mardi Gras followed by Ash Wednesday. I did not want to wake from winter dreams, oblivion streaming desire and and elaboration. I grasp at the dreams to keep them but they are resentful, clinging to the knowledge that I still want them but nevertheless trying to cut the connections. Their knives are dull. I’m only bruised, though I sting with awakening. I just won’t open my eyes yet.