Spring has made me manic.
Spring always makes us a little bit manic, but this year my case is extreme. Ordinarily an early riser, I find myself awaking even earlier and waiting impatiently for the sun to rise so I can be out and doing. (It is before sunup now or I probably would be doing instead of writing.)
I think there are a couple of reasons for my mania. The winter of 2010-11 seemed to have more consecutive days of unrelieved dreariness than most.There were not as may of those brief breaks when it was really pleasant to throw the kayak in the water and paddle or to take a long walk without bundling up as if for an expedition.
It wasn't just the past (I hope it has passed) winter that has fueled the mania. Medical adventures in the past couple of years, the heart thing and the cancer thing and then the unfortunate incident with the table saw left me more absorbed with self than with nature.
Helping with the restoration of the Smith Mountain Fire Tower and carving out hiking trails on the mountain have absorbed a good deal of outdoor time, but that's a whole other column. Around home, I managed to replace the decrepit steps leading from our dock down to the lake bed before the water got too high. I've raked dead leaves that have accumulated way too long and picked up fallen limbs; I finally got the shredder-mulcher running, so a lot of those will be reduced in size and returned to the earth. I got the lights on the patio working again and replaced the screen wire on the door to the porch. I wonder how long it will be before another child pokes his hand through the screen. Based on past experience, it will be before the summer is out.
I have been making some terraces with stones gathered from my neighbors country land = he says rocks are his principle crop = and planning more elaborate schemes to keep the dirt from washing down our half hill and into the lake.
Even as I work away, my project list grows longer. Dirty work clothes are a perplexity for my wife.She insists on washing them; I try to hold onto them for another day = or two.
"They're filthy," she says.
"I just put them on (meaning two or three days ago)," I insist.
She wins.
I have learned that I enjoy physical labor far more than I did when I was younger. The rhythm of labor frees the mind to wander all over the universe. The other day I found myself thinking of A.E. Housman's poem about the beauty of cherry blossoms, especially the line, "now of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again. And take from seventy years a score, it only leaves me fifty more. and since to look at things in bloom, fifty springs are little room, about the woodland I will go to see the cherry hung with snow."
Callow youth. I have reached my threescore and ten, and I expect to welcome a good many more springs.
There's one last reason for this spring mania: Before we know it, it will be so hot that the outdoors is most comfortably enjoyed by looking at it through a double-glazed window from an air conditioned room.
Meanwhile, the sun is about to come up; time for another cup of coffee and then out the door.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
