Snow and Birdsong: The Time Between (an everyday essay)

This post is part of the "Everyday Essays" series. See below for a description of the series, and read others essays here.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

These are the days of snow and birdsong. Soggy brown yards and a few green slips of daffodil leaves. The time between.

This is the end of March in southwestern Pennsylvania, the Keystone State that doesn't truly belong to any one region.

Keystone (noun): the wedge-shaped piece at the crown of an arch that locks the other pieces in place

Keystone (noun): something on which associated things depend for support

Where and what are we, here in the shadow of the Laurel Mountains, those foothills of the Appalachians?

Not exactly the Northeast, despite our chilly, white winters. This isn't New England with its cold ground holding firm well into April.

Not the South by any means, despite our humid summers. It's true that West Virginia is just an hour away and that traces of a southern drawl twang in the conversations of people still on this side of the border, but we're Yankees here in the Commonwealth.

This isn't the East Coast, since this corner of the state sits six hours inland. Some people try to wed us to Ohio and lump us in with the flat Midwest, but I'm not buying it. Have you seen the hills in these parts?

So here we are, the middle of everywhere, suspended in the slice of time that feels like the center of all time. Everything depends on everything else.

Winter and spring play catch with each other in the wind. We all know how this game goes, and by the last day of March our money is on spring every time. But even the most stalwart gamblers among us start to wonder if maybe this time we should have hedged our bets. (Just the other day I found myself peeking under pieces of shrubbery, looking for a purple jackpot of crocus. The next day that same shrubbery disappeared under six inches of snow.)

I've stayed inside all week, sitting on the couch and breathing through my mouth in the suspended animation of a late-winter (early-spring?) sinus infection. Tonight I drank a glass of mud-green smoothie, willing the chlorophyll to work a miracle in my own pale cells. Pots of tea (green, white, black) keep me warm while snow flurries swirl and melt before adding themselves to the little icebergs of leftover snow-ice edging the road. (A robin hops between two large chunks at the end of my driveway.) My fridge holds huge bouquets of kale and a small plastic square of organic blueberries. I'll have a superfood banquet while I wait for breath, for sunlight, for the shift from here to now.

Quick now, here, now, always -

** ** **

(The final line of this essay is also taken from Eliot's "Burnt Norton.")

About Everyday Essays: At least a few times a week I jot down notes about something -- usually a small moment, detail, or thought -- that I want to write about. Most of those ideas stay frozen as notes and never bloom into essays. Everyday Essays is my writing practice to allow some of those notes to move beyond infancy. I've decided to share some of them with you here, even if they're still half-naked or half-baked. The word "essay" (as is almost always noted when the form is discussed) comes from the French verb essayer, which means to try. The essay is a reckoning, a rambling, an exploration, an attempt. Think of these Everyday Essays as freewriting exercises, rough drafts, or the jumbled, interconnected contents of my mind, which may or may not take root and grow into longer (deeper) essays.

Comments

[Kimberley McGill]

I like the way you connected your lack of breath (your sinus infection) with the waiting in that space between winter and spring.

At least the cold/infection served a literary purpose!