Ah, spring. The snow slowly receding to reveal the scattered detritus of his life. Loops of baling twine. An old tricycle. The half-handle of broken garden spade. A pipe wrench, gone to rust but salvageable. If you can read a person’s life in their garbage, what can you discern from the etcetera emerging from the snow around their home? Perhaps not everything. But perhaps everything that matters.    

It’s never been his favorite season, for reasons he can’t fully define. Sure, he appreciates the return of sun and heat, the feeble-legged lambs nuzzling for a milk-rich tit, the onion shoots straining upward, bent toward the light because they know that, after all, we are all merely children of the sun. The first bicycle ride, the first motorcycle ride, the last ski. The piglets. He loves the piglets beyond reason. Yes, these are all good things.    

But in spring, more than any other season, the implications and repercussions of what he does and doesn’t do right are at their heaviest, and his energy tends toward the frenetic while his attention, none too steadfast to begin with, is teased into frayed strands. Northern lore suggests that autumn is the season of frantic preparation, but Northern lore seems strangely ignorant of the truth that everything that happens in autumn is dependent on the complex orchestration of April and May. Seeds must be sown according to myriad needs of sun and water and soil temperature.  The maples must be tapped in time to catch that first sweet, heavy run. The critters must be monitored and, if necessary, aided through the year’s freshenings. Compost, the rich loam that’s become of last year’s shit and hay, must be spread. Firewood shall be cut, split, stacked. He thinks, not for the first time, that the folks who declare spring the season of renewal have got it backwards. Spring isn’t renewal; spring is everything you do so that you might achieve renewal six months hence, that you might be blessed with yet another winter of abundance or, at the least, survival.    

He doesn’t mean for all this to sound burdensome. Clearly, he’s chosen this path; clearly, one does not shoulder these loads year after year after year if they truly feel like loads. These things, along with the two fine, sturdy boys he puts to bed each night, the woman who so willingly forgives his many failings, and the sweet piece of earth he’s been entrusted with, aren’t merely tasks to be completed, chores to be checked off a list so that he might get on with his life. They are his life. For that, he is deeply, fantastically grateful.    

So he’ll spend this spring the way he spends every other spring, running from one project to the next, reminding himself, between footfalls, to pause now and again. To breathe deep the wet, loamy scent of snow-bare earth. To trust in himself and everything in his view: the boys, hauling brush to a smoky bonfire, his wife, dropping pea seeds into the cool soil, the cows fat with calf. Spring, so quickly and faithfully, has come. And just as quickly, it will be gone.

‘The Greenneck’ lives and writes in the rusted-out shell of a one-ton Chevy pickup somewhere in Cabot.