Spring Passover Moon
Yesterday when I came out to let Gertie and Rigel out of the garage, around 5 am, I looked up at the stars, as I always do, enjoying the clear skies here. That long evolved predator/prey seeking eye caught, right away, a high object streaking across the sky. Was it a satellite, the space station? I don’t know, but I do know that in my childhood, my own childhood, no person on earth could have gone outside, looked up at the sky and seen such a sight. Until Sputnik the only streaking objects in the sky were meteors and comets. Nothing moved quickly across the darkness, up with the stars, yet did not fall or disappear around the sun.
This morning when I came out, at about the same time, the stars were absent, covered by clouds. Six or seven inches of new, wet snow lay on the deck outside our backdoor and it was snowing hard. Still is. This storm is delivering on its forecasted levels. Yeah! This wet snow clogs up the snow blower so we’re having Ted, the handyman/snowplower guy from Ames, Iowa (just across I-35 from Kate’s hometown of Nevada), take care of our driveway. He came about 20 minutes ago and may be back if it the snow continues until midnight as the winter storm warning suggests.
It’s light out now and Black Mountain has once again disappeared from view, covered in clouds and snow. The school bus just went past. Being a school bus driver in the mountains in the winter must be challenging. Along with school bus driver, the other two jobs I would not like to have up here are mail person and garbage truck driver. They all have to navigate the mountain roads rain or shine, sleet or snow. They all have to stop frequently, counting on the skills of others not to kill them while they do their work.
The snow shuts off our solar panels just like night. I bought a snow rake to release the snow on them, but I haven’t used it yet. Maybe today.
People out here call it Colorado weather. I call it mountain weather. The shifts are often extreme, from snow and ice to balmy, springlike. But today. Well, today will be a transition like none I’ve seen since I got here. We have a red flag warning in effect from noon today until 6 pm. That means low humidity, high winds, warm temps and plenty of dried out fuel. At 6 pm though we switch to a winter storm watch. The prediction is for up to a foot of snow tomorrow, more over the next week. If we can avoid fire through this afternoon, we should be fine for a while.
Yet it is not a true analog. Mother earth only seems to defy winter and the fallow time. It is not, in fact, death and resurrection, but a continuum of growth, slowed in the cold, yes, but not stopped forever, then magically restarted. Corms, bulbs, tubers and rhizomes all store energy from the previous growing season and wait only for the right temperature changes to release it. Seeds sown by wind and animal, by human hand are not dead either. They only await water and the right amount of light to send out roots and stalks.
I prefer the actual analog in which human and other animals’ bodies, plant parts and the detritus of other kingdoms, all life, return their borrowed materials to the inanimate cache, allowing them to be reincarnated in plant and animal alike, ad infinitum. Does this deny some metaphysical change, some butterfly-like imaginal cell possibility for the human soul? No. It claims what can be claimed, while reserving judgment on those things that cannot.
It is spring, I think, that gives us this hope, no matter how faint, that death might be only a phase change, a transition from this way of becoming to another. It’s possible.
Went out yesterday with the pole saw and began the task of trimming branches on our lodgepole pines. OMG. Working that saw, always over my head, wore me out pretty fast though I did get several trees limbed. Splintered Forest rents power pole saws and I might rent one for the rest of the work.