I know that Spring has come to Maine when I find myself driving behind a huge tractor towing the sharpest, spikiest, most unidentifiable piece of farm equipment I've ever seen, and it's all over the road. Taking a break from practicing the training I am about to deliver, I try to determine how many jobs this piece of equipment can fulfill. I am still coming up with ideas when it finally careens off the road into a driveway.
Everything is coming out all over, as we all lurch into Spring. I can't believe it is mid-May. I feel like it must mean something, but I can't remember or think of what it is. That is part of the discombobulation. The field around our house went from dead to lush green in less than a week. Yet we've also lit a few fires in the woodstove in the past several days because of the cold temperatures.
Arlo began sleeping a big chunk of time at night (6-7 hours) about a month or so back, so I am coming out of the longest, most sleep-deprived time of my life. This is its own herky-jerky, false-start sort of experience. I feel a renewed connection with him, spontaneous joy, and delight bubbling up at lots of moments throughout any given day. I simultaneously feel like, "Where have I been? What the Hell happened?" Whether it was exhaustion or depression or both over this winter, who knows - I was blurry, many times unable to put sentences together, and overall so underwater that I wasn't even missing being able to talk anyway. I read an article the other day that described the first year for moms of sleepless babies as the "Dark Time," and while I wouldn't have dared describe it that way when I was in it, looking back it sure does smell bleak and foggy to me now.
I have been out weeding the flower garden for a half hour a day for the past week. I do not remember weeding the garden a single time last summer - I think my stepson did it for me finally at the end of the summer. Strangely, the flowers are somehow blooming, despite being embedded in a strangling carpet of witch grass. And as with the rest of my life, I am trying to bring it all back into the fold, slowly, 15 minutes at a time here and there. It's baby steps, but at least I am on my feet again, right?
There were a lot of days over the winter when I didn't feel like getting up because I was so tired I couldn't imagine navigating the day ahead, and going to bed at night was no better because I knew I wouldn't sleep two hours in a row. Now it is the exception when Arlo wakes for the first time before 2 or 3 in the morning, and he always sleeps again until 6 or 6:30. Through this winter I attended to my consulting projects, washed and folded endless loads of laundry, tried new recipes, and made a few, but not many, phone calls. But mostly what I recall, is being cold, and very, very tired.
So Arlo is changing as the world awakens, and it all is moving forward, growing, and showing itself. It's a wild world, and as the mountain passes open, the water rushes everywhere, trying to join with other water. The newspaper is full of enhanced craziness, but mostly I am paying attention to the others I see stretching and squinting into the light too, looking to connect again. It's so nice to be among the living, something it is easy to forget in the dark of winter in Maine. Today as Arlo and I filled the birdbath together, we stopped to watch two Canadian geese fly and honk overhead. "Dat! Dat!" He said. I wholeheartedly agree.
