The snow’s still here, but each step is like walking on pork scratchings. Mounds of soft white fluff have become crackling towers, and in town, very brown ones. It’s spring, and while to most other parts of the world that means greenery and flowers, here it means masses of light, and pork scratchings.
Not that we don’t like it. Of course we like it. After months of winter, and darkness (at least some of the time), we’re ready for a change. Sort of. We love the warmth, and the long bright days sitting out on the lake, face turned to the sun. It’s just that – it’s very very bright, that sun, reflected off all these white pork scratchings. Almost blinding in fact – we’re blinking like albino ferrets out of captivity, wondering what happens next.
The spring is welcome, but it’s demanding. ‘Spring tiredness’ they call it. Too much stimulation, like a sort of reverse jet lag. No chance now of seeing aurora – the sky is light all night. The light tells us to stay awake for many many hours but increasingly those hours all look the same. Just endless light, the sun slowly coming into an almost horizontal orbit, circling overhead, no highs or lows, no sunrises and sunsets.
There’s a slight resistance in the body, a digging in of the heels, a trying to slow the acceleration to the light. You see nature’s resistance to spring all around you; not only in thick ice on all the lakes but also in ‘skare’, snow like pork scratchings. Water and snow, usually so soft, so giving, so in tune with the flow, now has a hard, brittle surface. When you meet its resistance with force, it shatters like shards of glass.
Soon we’ll let go and give in to the thaw, but for now we enjoy our picnic on the lake in the warm sun, with no mosquitoes to bother us.
