THE THING ABOUT SPRING

I don’t mean the blossoms and butterflies, birdsong and frog choruses, blue skies with hawks in love and whatnot, they’re all great don’t get me wrong, but there’s the rocks to be moved out in front from around the Heavenly Bamboo etc. for that edging thing we’re gonna do, the forsythia has to be moved back too, then there’s the huge jinchoge bush that because the heavy snows from the roof (who can foresee everything?) bent it over so much is overgrowing straight into the driveway and has to be cut back as soon as its done blossoming, then dug out and transplanted up behind the stone wall where it can knock itself out with blossoms all over the place, be my guest, and of course all the edging stones out back that have to be moved for the big garden re-do we’re planning, in re which the shiitake logs have to be restacked out of the way, wherever that might be, there’s some pondering to be done there sometime, same for the leftover firewood, in which connection I also have to asap split the plane tree sections we scavenged so they can maybe dry enough over the summer, then there’s the rain gutter plan, the deck to be painted, and-- but the accursedly soft caresses of this vicious and intractable Spring Fever that has me in its marshmallow grip-- it’s incurable I know, as a victim of all the past Springs - decades of them stacked up - I have to accept it, nothing can be done, I simply have to live through it, wait it out as always, helplessly sipping a medicinal beer out in the afternoon sun on the deck like this, whence I view these pending labors much as Hercules must have scoped the stables etc. in his day, only I’m breathing the perfume of jinchoge and plum blossoms and cursing my laggard fate, staring now and then at the lake, filling the distances all around with random eyesight and forgetting whatever all that stuff I just wrote about was. The sudden absence of recollection brings welcome relief.