I might be one of the few Pittsburghers not embracing the
impending thaw with wistful thoughts of spring. I know I’m freakish in this
respect.
It has been a long, cold winter, peppered with snow days, two-hour
delays, and polar vortices marching down from the Arctic in an unending parade
of Jetstream mayhem. We haven’t seen the boxwoods lining our driveway in weeks,
piled over with mound upon mound of dirty, slushy snow, now a couple feet deep.
My husband drove into a snowbank the other day to avoid a multi-car collision
on his way to work and only got going again due to a determined Good Samaritan.
We’re running out of salt, running out of clear parking places, and running out
of patience for the cold—and all the fluffy white stuff that goes with it.
I get it. It hasn’t been fun.
But whoever coined the phrase “the lazy days of summer” obviously
didn’t own a home in the suburbs.
Weeding. Cutting. Fertilizing. Planting. Mulching.
It seems once the warm weather breaks, all hopes of a lazy weekend
curled up with a book and a cup of coffee break with it, replaced by a sort of
implied obligation to beautify the yard, or at least keep it from looking like
the overgrown, rundown drug hovels you see on the evening news.
In the winter, you can neglect the mess outside. When it’s not
hidden by the snow, it’s at least brown and dormant, not causing any real
trouble, not looking any worse than anyone else’s brown, dormant patch of the
world. No one notices the stray weeds around the edges of the beds that you
didn’t pluck last fall or the sparse mulch coverage around the new trees you
planted last spring. They’re too busy grumbling about the ice and snow you
haven’t removed from the sidewalk (okay, so you do have to do a little
something in winter).
But once spring hits, it’s as if a veil is lifted. Suddenly our
homes and yards reveal themselves in all their shabby, neglected glory, and we
feel a sort of collective urge to roll up our sleeves and get to work, to make
our yards look like something akin to the Biltmore grounds (or, at the very
least, better than the yards on either side of us). I blame this in no small
measure on the barrage of ads we’ll all start to see in a few short weeks
showing enthusiastic young couples piling sacks of fertilizer and mounds of
colorful flowers onto carts at various home improvement warehouses in an effort
to cultivate the most enviable yard on the block.
A yard, I might add, that they will then spend the entire spring,
summer, and fall mowing down and throwing away. But I digress.
I do enjoy getting out in the warmth and the sunshine, don’t get
me wrong. I love biking, taking walks through my neighborhood, or just watching
my kids run around the yard creating kingdoms and performing quests using only their
imaginations and their friends. I love riding with the car windows down,
blaring Rusted Root and smelling the grass and flowers and freshly-tilled soil
of the farm up the street. I love trips to the zoo, Rita’s frozen custard, hikes
at McConnell’s Mill, and our annual church festival. I’m looking forward to it
all.
But when the spring thaw hits, I can’t help but think of its
accompanying workload, and the backaches that come with it. And so, rather than
rush to embrace the spring, I plan to curl my hands around another hot cup of
coffee, relishing the fact that we still have another good month before the
yard work begins in earnest. In the meantime, I plan to tackle at least a
couple more crocheting projects, and maybe a novel or two, before my lazy
weekends vanish in the sun.
