Cabin Fever

Out in the yard, the snow is gone. Not even a trace of it is left. Henry’s plastic playhouse is propped up. Can’t tell what Donny stuck beneath it – a board of some kind I suppose. Only days ago it needed to be angled for all the snow to melt and run off. It’s green, red, and blue sides, tilted and lopsided now, fill the yard with a rakish air.

Donny’s already had the conversation with me about changing things too. He gets ambitious at this time of year. He wants to move the back yard fence deeper into the woods. I say, “It sounds like a lot of work,” and hope he doesn’t do it. But he can if he wants. There’s a lot more woods than yard.

I might get ambitious toward the end of May. Memorial Day. That’s when you plant. That’s what the old-timers like my dad always said.

The rivers are rising and the first shoots of the perennials are coming up through the leafs and birdseed.

At the convenience store, the Arab gentleman told me the weather would last. I said, “No. We’ll have another snow storm.”

“Is it predicted?” he asked.

“Uh…no. We just will.”

The only other person I’ve said it to is my mother. I don’t want her to get too despondent when it comes. She hasn’t lived here her whole life. It seems to make a difference…as if…by only spending 50 years in Minnesota, you somehow miss it that there’s always a major snow storm in March, usually just after you’ve put your boots away.

Since I have the cabin out back, it gives a whole new meaning to cabin fever. I was out there a week ago and swept her out and washed the floor and the rug, wiped down the desk and the table. It’s one of the more amazing feats of spring that I can go out and find her unchanged…right down to the crumbs on the couch.

You don’t ever get that feeling entering a room in a house. As if the room just sat there and waited for you to return, and was undisturbed during the wait. I’d left the last newspaper article I’d brought with me on the desk. I should have checked the date. It was an announcement for an Anne Lamott, Trish Hampl combo…both of them speaking on the luminous. I never use that word, but I could imagine it as I opened up the cabin that first day, and as I await the snowstorm with a new, but still short pile of books (three), and the Fahrenheat.