Spring is so tiring for me.
I don’t know if it’s my age, or if it’s the rapidly fluctuating weather, but this season just sucks the life right out of me. Valley springs are just grey, cloudy, wet expanses of pain punctuated by absurd swings of weather.
The climate apocalypse we’re living through doesn’t really help matters. Wednesday morning of the 27th there was icy snow covering my car, coating everything in a hard, chunky mass of white inconvenience that I’d thought we’d left behind in early March.
(And yes, I am well aware this gives away that I often write these on my deadline day. I’m the proofreader, I have some leeway to add things in at the last minute.)
Flooding is an everpresent concern. Basements are an ever-concerning game of Schrodinger’s Water Damage, where I fear checking not knowing if I’m going to have a puddle, or water up to my ankles. With 2019’s flood still fresh in most of our minds and our bankbooks, it’s a great concern, and while we’ve been lucky so far, the rising water levels could very well lead to another washed-out spring at any time. Even with the Township of Whitewater Region’s studies into Flood Prevention and strategies, actually dealing with a flood in a stressful affair that pits all of our engineering and planning against a natural world that not only outstrips us in complexity, but shows a remarkable level of pushback against our wanton abuses of its chemical cocktail.
Grey rainy skies and rapid shifts in temperature can’t do much for our mood. As much as we’re expected to tough it out, your body often has far less willpower, and any lingering fatigue and depression gets all the worse when your external conditions bounce around like a kayak someone forgot to tie down to the back of their trailer.
We’re at the period when the community starts to rise from its winter slumber, with the outdoors becoming once again livable. Farmers can once again work the land and prepare for next rotation; students can nominally go outside after school without being encase in synthetic wool. Sunlight lasts long enough for us to see it after we leave, unless you prefer the middle of the night like me. The Whitewater Gardeners all rise from their beds, eager to coax the blooms that make our green community a bit more vibrant about it.
COVID-19 isn’t a thing of the past yet – and I’m not convinced that we’re anywhere close to normal, nor am I going to stop wearing my mask around the community if I can help it. But after two years of it, this spring is looking a bit safer, with vaccines in our systems and sanitizer on every counter. We’re in an area where the land is vast and the forests deep enough to avoid enormous crowds if we need to, so it may be all the better this time around.
Summer can’t get here fast enough.
