We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

I spoke too soon. I always do. The first warm day always does this, the first buds, the first bees. We saw bees on Monday, bees greedily visiting our pocket of crocuses by the rose bushes, and my mind turned to spring, turned sharp and sudden. It couldn’t last, of course, this is March in Switzerland; we can get – have gotten – snow on Easter, after all. I know that, after all these years I know that a warm day can be followed by snow. But that first day, that first post card from spring, always sets my head spinning.

Remembering spring

I came back from the mountains to find the first hints of spring, spring at last after this long grey winter. Every year I forget: forget how grey the winter will be, forget the dense fog that blankets the sky, forget the dismal way the fields look when they are only half-covered with snow. This year there have been new things to learn about winter. How the gravel road leading to our house becomes pock-marked with holes. How our driveway becomes a river of mud. How our car gets covered with splatter and spray. How the boys track little grains of salt into the house however many doormats I lay down.

But this morning there are signs of spring. The snow has melted away to show the green grass. The snowbells are up under the willow tree. The bulbs I planted last fall are beginning to sprout. My thoughts have turned to the garden and the plans I must make with my mother-in-law. Today, at least, the sky is blue and the sun is shining into my kitchen and there is a bird singing out my window. Today, at least, I remember what I had forgotten, what it seems impossible to forget and what I forget every year: it ends. The fog burns off, sooner or later, and spring returns.

Wish fulfillment

Last August, when the doctor came into my little partitioned off section of the ER and told me that I had pulmonary emboli, one of the many things I panicked about was that I would die before I got to hear The Boychen say he loves me. I’m still not keen on dying any time soon, but as of today I would have one fewer thing to panic about.

It also happens to be my birthday, and can I just say: best. present. ever.

“A train is a dragon…”

As I am standing on the platform waiting for my train to take me to the city for my appointment with hematology, a freight train speeds through the station on the opposite track. The snow, light and dry as soap flakes, swirls in eddies, rises and falls, dances back from the tracks. The cold air pushed forward by the train hits me, I lift my face from the article I am reading, close my eyes as the wind surrounds me and flutters the pages of my magazine, breathe. I taste iron, and dust, and winter. I feel the wheels clattering under my feet, rumbling deep in my chest. I think of a snippet of a poem on one of the Small Boy’s “educational DVDs”:

“A Modern Dragon,”
By Rowena Bastin Bennett
 
A train is a dragon that roars through the dark
He wriggles his tail as he sends up a spark.
He pierces the night with his one yellow eye,
And all the earth trembles when he rushes by.

Metaphors are important to me; it’s what I do. Words, however inadequate, and I do think they are inadequate to the task most of the time, are the only way to cross the rivers between us. Metaphors and similes, images and comparisons, get us closer to the heart of things; but only closer, never there. Maybe it is a fundamental lack of faith in my own talent, but how can I ever bring you onto the platform next to me, with the train rushing by, the sound changing as a container car gives way to an empty flatbed, the dancing snow, the wind in my face, the iron in my mouth, the abandoned page fluttering in my hand? What metaphor for this moment, gone now with the train? Always down the track, not halting at this station.

I still would

Yesterday R’s parents took the boys so that R and I could have a few hours together in the city. A nice lunch, some holiday shopping, a cafe latte and our respective books. It has always been one of our favorite things to do, just to sit near each other and read, looking up now and then or nudging each other with our toes. We don’t get to do it much anymore. Yesterday afternoon we did, and over the top of my book I stole a glance at him sitting across from me in his black sweater and new jeans and thought, “Yeah, I’d still hit on him in a bar.”

This, tonight

Walking across the drive from my mother-in-law’s house, I hear my brother-in-law’s white horse nickering for his chestnut companion who has been taken out for a ride by J. I can smell wood smoke, and the pine trees in the woods next to our house, and snow whispering to us from the Eiger on the horizon line. The lights on our house have just gone on and the sun is setting behind the birch tree. I am walking home to fry eggplant for dinner, to put into a tomato sauce with garlic and olive oil and fresh parsley; I am here on the gravel drive between the two houses my sons call home. It is a good place to be.

Raspberries

Also from several weeks ago…

A walk in the woods

We live next to the woods. Some of it is privately owned and occasionally harvested; some of it is a nature preserve with a pond, a brook, and ducks. There is a fox, there are herons. The boys treat it as their private paradise and go into the woods almost every day; it is my mother-in-law’s favorite thing to do with them. This afternoon we went on a mushroom expedition, or, as the Boychen said “memli looga” (Schwemmli luega, Swiss for looking at mushrooms). There was also dancing and tree climbing.

The last morning of vacation

From my journal, dated Saturday the fifth:

“Last night I tasted winter in the air, winter sneaking in over the mountains like a girl sneaking in past curfew on tip-tap toes. This morning there is snow on the high peaks. The locals – our hiking guide Hans, the hotel owner Walter – smile, says it’s not really snow, just Zuckerpulver (powdered sugar) and it will be gone by afternoon. They are right, of course, on both counts, but it is there all the same. Winter: sending a post card from her summer vacation, telling us it was nice and now she is on her way home.”

Evening

A thunderstorm moves through in the late evening, lightning flickering like a dying light bulb, thunder far then suddenly near, a crack outside the window and then the thunder keeps rippling, rippling. The sky is illuminated again and again, the rain slowly grows softer but the lightning flashes, flashes again and I remember watching together with R a thunderstorm roll in across a vast Wyoming plain. He is still working downstairs. I go and get him and together we lean out the bedroom window and watch the sky flash.