“Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter,” the Beatles sang, and while my winter wasn’t so lonely, it felt unduly long and cold this year. But here it is, an April evening, the day’s 85-degree heights starting to crash down in the big wind bringing in the big storm, and I’m back on the porch again.
This is the place I love best: sitting in air continually pouring through itself and turning up the creaking of the trees and banging of the just-barely-budding branches. As goes spring most years, and truth be told (because this is Kansas), just about any time any year, the weather is fiercely changing its clothes, on its way to dropping 50 degrees by morning. The magnolia trees, at full blossom, are about five miles away in town, and I hope their flowers will live to see another day. The squirrels are running in circles. The dog is whining.
I’ve always been a creature of sky and wind, which explains in great part why I found such homecoming in Kansas. Now I’m in the soup (once it starts raining soon) of it all, my hair aiming 16 directions at once, my feet a little cold, my arms happily supporting these typing fingers, and my soul at peace…..at least for now before it gets too cold and wet to be here.
Winter will take over again, then spring, then summer, then spring, and so on, and I’ll be here in a front row seat to see and feel it all. Welcome back, porch.
I’m also sharing a poem I wrote a few years ago about just this time of year:
Is It Spring? Is It Winter?
The green intrusion backs and forths itself
for weeks, as if it’s in in question
who will take over the narrative.
It snows in April, and the next night,
a hard freeze kills the possibility
of peaches from the two volunteer trees
that rose from the compost pile.
See? Says the deer walking right up
to the field camera we set in the woods
to show us one large right eye.
Yes, I see, I answer the tiny chip of images
inserted in my computer to bring there to here.
Then I walk out the back door to the tilt-a-whirl
of weather, and once again, as if it has any time
on its hands, ask the sky to help us.
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