Endurance

Endurance

My amusing husband thinks Ivan Denisovich had it pretty easy. He lived with a lot of snow, and he did physical work--big deal. We have snow, isolation, and physical work too. My husband would add to that unpleasant list ice fishing, which, he says would be declared torture if you described it to human rights lawyers.

You get a little hut dragged out onto the ice, see, and you stay in it for hours looking into a little hole you’ve chopped in the ice, into which you’ve lowered your ridiculous fishing line. Then, if you catch something, it will probably contain enough poison to knock off your entire party, if they’re not already frozen to death.

Even without ice fishing, endurance is a challenge to muster at this time of the year. Eight foot snowbanks shrink by inches in the most beautiful, miraculous-feeling spring weather, that is, actually, anything above 40 degrees.

Everywhere else, it’s spring. Of course, in Seattle, where I’m told the daffodils are in bloom and people are mowing their lawns, but also in Boston. Even in Burlington Vermont--no snow! In Amherst the other day, someone was playing conga drums on the green, people were stretched out on the soon-to-be-green grass. One young man was just spread eagled on the bare ground. All thoughts of having to mince across icy walks, or button up were long gone, if only for an afternoon.

When we returned, the landscape was pure winter, with roads a little muddy for all the melting that had gone on. But on the road, between the snowbanks, it was like a walk-in freezer, the snow threw such cold. We hurried inside and stoked the fire.

The question is, why do we do it? Plenty of savvy Vermonters head south in March and April, or at least to non-snowy destinations. Some stay there longer and only come back for summers. We can’t right now, but someday, we could, and might.

There is something though, about embracing what is going on now, however ambivalent you are about still having to shovel a path to the woodshed, the barn. The way we scan the fields for patches of ground (none yet) is certainly a form of love, though a bit on the conditional side. The way we stand on the porch on a windy night trying to find a ribbon of warmth in the gusts, willing the wind to evaporate the snow, is, though delusional, at least engaged with the natural world in some small way.

The way we look for any sign at all of spring is sort of touching, throwing our little hope out to world like a grappling hook, so that it will catch on anything, and hold. What’s the YIddish saying? Man plans and God laughs?

At least time will eventually cure spring fever, whether or not March dumps more of its customarily heavy snow and ice storms.