 © Alice Whitney 2019 Originally published on or about the 3rd of April in 1998, this is yet another post about a seemingly never ending winter - or the equally pessimistic never arriving spring. Please enjoy. “ ‘April is the cruellest month,’ ” my wife quoted as we rounded the corner of a building in Saint John, and were met with the full force of a nasty east wind the other day. It certainly seemed as though T.S. Eliot was right, although he goes on to talk about “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,” a feat that around here is going to have to wait for the nearer side of two months hence. Somehow, that spectacular last day of March, when the sun shone and the temperature in the shade got up into the middle seventies Fahrenheit, severely dislocated our thoughts, and made the inevitable return to a grudging spring a good deal harder to take. And an east wind, I don’t care when it arrives, tends to set one’s teeth on edge. When the wind is in the east ‘Tis neither fit for man nor beast.  © Alice Whitney 2019 A lovely piece about the ambiguous nature of the changing of the seasons. Originally published approximately fifteen years ago on the 19th of April, 2019... yes, late for snow.
Snow! At five o’clock this morning even though day was (theoretically) beginning, the view out the windows was no view at all. Later this morning when Environment Canada was telling us that we were getting flurries, we could barely see the trees at the back of the home field below the road. And now three hours later it is still snowing. Hey, ho, it’ll all be gone in a day or two. Or, was that what I said last year around this time and a week or so later the snow was still with us? Only by then it had congealed into ice and the ruts we had made with the car when the snow stopped had also congealed. The car, as I recall, slipped and slithered in the grooves and the steering wheel was quite useless. By the time it became clear that the snow had no intention of going in the foreseeable future, it was also clear that nothing short of a bulldozer would budge it. Our little snowblower ran happily about on top but when directed at an edge, behaved like a small dog who has been told to tear a concrete lion limb from limb. |
