My goodness. It’s been an abysmally long time since my last post! It’s uncanny how quickly time cooks away when your fire is roasting too many irons, snapping and sizzling with sounds of the future and enticing possibilities. The Year of the Rat has lived up to its promise of new beginnings and change for us, and it’s not even half over! Good beginnings and good change, though. Sometimes the things that appear most wrenching and catastrophic really are the most cathartic and rejuvenating. So it’s fitting this blog entry comes during spring, a time of rebirth and renewal blooming from the desolation of winter.In Idaho, spring isn’t heralded just by the Canadian geese and the gluttonous rush of the Snake River, but by the rumble of Harleys! Idaho has a large and very active HOG community, one that longingly waits in hibernation during the Idaho winter. Yet the nanosecond the weather warms in spring, these impressive machines are coaxed into gleaming glory by loving polishing hands and ignited awake from their winter slumber, to thunder out in eager hordes as if to chase away the winter solstice. Each day blessed with glorious spring weather will cause the roads to be generously seeded with these two-wheeled harbingers of summer, as social bonds are re-affirmed and new adventures are mapped out and planned.
Another messenger of Spring for me is surf music. I have long been enamored of this eclectic and idiosyncratic form of music, one that’s unencumbered by vocals and so allows room for the instruments, especially the guitar, to “talk” and the mind to wander into curious places. There’s something about the energy, the airiness and the peculiarity of this style of music that speaks to me of shedding the grimy cloaks of winter’s chill to bask in the new glow of whimsy and unconventional wisdom. My husband and I were lucky to catch Dick Dale’s last tour back in 2006, as it kicked off here in little ol’ Boise. What a great concert, by such a grand old school musician! My signed poster (above left) beams like a beacon in my office during winter's grey gloom, promising Spring just around the next sunrise.I love Spring. From the deep hole of Winter, this season allows us to open up our house to let its freshness in, filling the house with sounds, smells and sensations almost forgotten during the oppression of snow. What was that?---a bird! Ahhhh---a warm breeze blowing through the living room! I smell a BBQ somewhere---in the office! Beautiful weather allows us to bring the outside inside, reacquainting us with Nature and arousing our senses once again to the tingly life of The World Outside.
Spring also is a joyous time for the Green Thumb, a thing I enviously am not. All of my houseplants are very good plants. Very strong, determined plants. They survive on sheer will power. I think I have very little to do with their continued survival, and I suspect they’d like to keep it that way. Yet those friends and family sanctified with that blessed shade of digit are now speaking of planting, potting and matters to do with dirt and seeds and clippings. I shall rejoice in their new shoots and buds, and daydream of luxurious gardens full of secret places, inner moments and the buzz of tended Nature flourishing unabashedly.
So I sit here, typing this blog entry listening to The Ventures with all the windows open, and gazing at my tulips popping up in my flowerbed as my husband polishes the chrome on his Fatboy. I hope your thaw is as restoring and invigorating this year, too! Welcome, Spring!
"I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face. " --Langston Hughes