And before I knew it, it was time to start cooking dinner

It took over an hour to walk home from Kindergarten with the Small Boy on his scooter and The Boychen in the stroller. There was an embankment to be climbed and a chance meeting with a neighborhood boy. There were three separate encounters with cats. There was looking for rocks on the edges of the fields, blowing dandelion seed pods, and rescuing an earthworm from the middle of the road. There were puddles to be jumped in and a small bug to be saved from drowning. There was the throwing of stones for distance and the throwing of stones for splash effect. Finally, there was the wide-legged walking contest. (I secretly think Boychen won because his wide-legged walk included weaving, swerving, and sound effects and because he made me laugh and say, “You are a funny little man, Boychen, and I love you so.”)

I can think of worse ways to spend an hour.

May day

I forget, always, how April tumbles forward like a colt running downhill. What takes so long to arrive, the first greening, disappears so quickly. The tentative days, the have-we-turned-the-corner-to-spring days, are gone. Once it happened, it happened so quickly. Spring is here. The apple and plum trees are in full flower. The tulips are up and the daffodils are gone, either dead-headed or hanging like forgotten paper lanterns. The boys have already blown their first dandelion seed heads. The picnic tables and chairs are under the willow tree that grows more green by the day. My brother-in-law has sown the corn and planted the potatoes; the wheat is already rich and green and a foot high. In the garden my mother-in-law and I have sown carrots and beans, planted onions and lettuce, set the tomato and aubergine plants. 

April, that time when the world tips back and forth between spring and not-yet spring, is gone. It is May and already I cannot remember wondering if spring would ever get here.

Clinging to life

A few of the apple branches on the wood pile are starting to blossom. They do not yet know that they are dead.

More notes from spring, illustrated

Kristen asked for some pictures from The Farm, and I’m happy to oblige.

Boychen and I spent the morning moving more rocks, bringing some dead plants to the Mist (I don’t know the English word for this: it’s where my brother-in-law dumps the old straw after he mucks out the horses’ stalls), and wandering around the farm. We blew soap bubbles and ate our morning snack outside in the sun, sitting on the rock wall my husband sat on when he was a boy.

To bring the rocks around to the rock pile, we’ve traded in the wheelbarrow for something with a little more horsepower:

Now if we could use this, we’d be done in no time:

* * *

About a week ago, I noticed that the moths had returned, beating against my kitchen window as I stood at the sink rinsing off the last of the dishes. Today I noticed that the butterflies, too, have returned.

* * *

While Boychen took his afternoon nap, the Small Boy (who is no longer so small and who will need a new pseudonym soon) and I played hockey in the driveway.

Between periods, he planted sunflowers.

* * *

And there was this:

and this (can you believe that sky?):

and this:

* * *

A farm country almanac

I think it is real this time, this turn towards spring. People who know better than I – the farmers who live in and around this village – are becoming active. On the twenty-minute walk to the school to pick up the Small Boy from Kindergarten, Boychen and I saw four tractors driving down the main road and two more on the way home. Then there is the one my brother-in-law cleaned today behind the barn, hosing everything down, tuning up the engine. In the afternoon he paced off the fields for plowing. The pace of life has very suddenly quickened in this farming community.

* * *

I am digging up more rocks, making another flower bed, this one on the other side of the kitchen door. Boychen brings the smaller ones to the rock pile next to the barn in his wheel-barrow, three soft-ball sized rocks at a time. It is slow, but heart-wrenchingly adorable.

* * *

The boys save their chicken bones for the fox that lives in the woods next to our house. Its den is right next to the foot path we take to the duck pond, and the boys and my mother-in-law have protected it from the many dogs that get walked in these woods by criss-crossing downed branches over the entrance. This is the fox that made quick work of five of eight ducklings last summer, something Small Boy knows very well, but he loves it anyway.

* * *

Yesterday I strapped The Boychen into his bike-on-a-stick and ran him up and down the hills on the mountain bike course in the woods. He now thinks I am the coolest. mama. ever! 

* * *

It was a long winter. Much, much too long. The farmers are out; half the gardens in the neighborhood are showing freshly turned dirt. The bees have found my crocuses. It was a long winter, but I think we’re turning the corner.

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.”