Forward, March!

 
I wrote this some years ago. But after this winter, when our yard has looked like this:
                                        

 

I'm feeling like I did the day I wrote it,

 and I thought I share it.

(I confess that it's a bit over-dramatic.)

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Of course I know that the snow will melt, eventually, and probably soon, without any help from me. But I am hungry for spring, and unwilling to remain a passive bystander to the natural process. I am impatient for the moment when I can look out over my snow-free yard and say, “This is spring.”

So I am partnering with the sun, helping it to melt the last stubborn lumps of white by spreading the snow in a thin layer. A note of irony greets me at the edge of the lawn: My husband labored many hours, moving this very snow from the driveway into piles in the yard, and now I am putting it back where he found it, hoping that my warm-hearted confederate in this business will banish it from the concrete within hours.

I wonder if the neighbors are thinking I am foolish. They cannot be expected to understand that this is no vain exercise, but rather a pivotal battle in the annually recurring conflict between winter and me. As I work, my task takes on heroic, almost epic proportions. I am a warrior, a nearly vanquished soldier returned for one last duel. Months ago I retired to my stronghold, conceding my enemy’s superiority, occasionally emerging, dressed in battle clothes and armed with a shovel, to stage a weak resistance. But mostly I have waited, confident that in time, my opponent would weaken. And then, I knew, the reserves would come.

So now, with a mighty battle cry in my heart, I have entered the fray in earnest. I work barefoot, daring the small frozen chunks that jump up as I comb them with the rake to strike my feet, and they do. Let them come. They fight valiantly at the end of their life, but they cannot hurt me now.


I hear water dripping off the roof; the sound of approaching victory. I glimpse a spot of red on the end of my rake and stoop to investigate. I have scraped up a ladybug, and it is now dead. The ladybug was not my enemy, and though I am saddened by this unexpected civilian casualty, my work continues. How many ladybugs has the snow itself killed, I wonder?

Many of my friends have learned to accept the enemy; some even embrace it, buying snowmobiles and ski passes. But I stand firm. I pretend not to know that my opponent is only retreating for a season, to gather strength in its own barracks before it returns full-force. I will not acknowledge this. I will not show weakness. I will put a plant on the porch, I will pack a picnic lunch, I will hang the hammock in the backyard.