Flotsam and Jetsam: Island Springs

— by Maurice Austin —

No, they’re not the source of that particular noise that develops in your Camry’s front end after too many trips up and down that pothole breeding factory you call a driveway, sheesh.

Though the meteorological calendar places the first day of Spring on March 1st, any Orcas Islander worth his or her salt knows that even the vernal equinox on March 20th is pushing it, some years. Sure, daffs are up, and cherry trees pinker and pinker, but February’s scolding lessons persist in memory like the memory of the boot that stepped on a worm, causing it to double up, and then freeze solid that way, poor thing, and without arms to reach its comfy hat.

Sure, we had a teaser of a few nice days, took the barbeque out maybe, left the automobile window down, so on. But early Spring is still dodgy, like a cardboard rain jacket, despite recent record temps. We’re not yet into the “Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes!” swing of things, as the wet can still park for days, and coupled with the egregiously cruel machinations of Daylight Savings Time, that means we get an extra daylight hour to sit inside and watch out the window as the petals get knocked off the daffs by Camry-sized raindrops.

In the dark, raindrops are just another function of the typically cloudy and overcast natural environment, but in the daylight, raindrops become an assault upon our idealized notion of sun, of barbeques and beach-volleyball-induced-sunburn and well just that faint, flickering hope that one day we might get a mediocre dose of vitamin D naturally, rather than in little gelatin capsules or by sucking unsuspecting tourists’ blood.

Oops—did I just write that out loud? *drip drip*

In the Fall, the line of most active precipitation hovers over the lower Skagit and Stillaguamish basins and that Oso/Lyman moisture parallel seems as unshakable as a soaked Chihuahua left exposed at 20 degrees below overnight. But in the Spring, the line seems to fluctuate on- and off-shore, like that friend who beams happiness one day, but is a Kleenex-devouring tear monster the next, much like my 12th grade Calculus teacher. Not that anybody could blame him.

Indeed Spring, and the renewal of the annual tax-return ritual of not-remembering your-PIN and standing-up-again-to-get-another-stupid-document, promises money for all, after all, or at least for your gardener, since if there is an ironclad law of the universe it is that if tansy is blooming, tansy will not be far behind, and neither will be more tansy. At least the blooms promise profit for someone.

Spring comes so stealthily, so subtly here that it often takes us unawares, since we’re bundled up in our comfy hats and insulated boots out of inertia, out of habit, despite the thermometer, which we trust about as much as the inter-island schedule in the summertime. And days later, we suddenly remember that one night, a week ago—was that January, or March 11th? That day we uncovered the barbeque, stood about in T-shirts, tentatively, and blinked at the limb-strewn lawn, which had finally drained, and was almost able to be walked upon without galoshes or water-skis, there we stood, pointing, look, look, there’s grass coming up through the deer droppings!

Ah, Spring! And time to take the Camry in for some front-end work, if you can find it under the piles of pollen suddenly dumped all over the yard…
…Gesundheit!