March 04, 2004

I've written well over a thousand words since Tuesday's post, but the essay drafts are mustangs...wild, barrel-chested creatures of the scrub-oak'd desert, untameable, tossing their wordy manes in parenthetical defiance with their rolling eyes ever-set on the next tangential idea!

And so forth. Maybe something will come of them. Maybe not. Who can tell?!

Spring is springing, and the front dirt has emerged from beneath its crust of dirty-pebbled snow. Front dirt, because there hasn't really been grass on it since we moved in, a double-wide trailer-looking oversight that will soon be remedied by a trip to Lowe's and the purchase of a sack o' seed, a walkabout seed caster, and some straw. Up the street, the second-to-last eyesore in the neigborhood is being gutted and renovated. Now it's up to us--the lord and and lady of Peapod Manor--to wow everyone with our complete home refurbishment. That will involve the removal of decades-old crap-siding (in a lovely shade of Filthy White, by Glidden); restoration of the original wooden siding beneath it that hasn't seen the sun since 1958; painting of said siding; and maybe the annihilation of the front porch and its replacement by something less utterly rotted and awful.

Gah.

The last weeks of February were a long, wire-drawn expanse of wretchedness during which every cell of my body cried out More light! We need more light! Leap Day was a cruel joke.

But now, ah now! The mud. Buds on the tips of the tree limbs, some of which will shortly be hacked off to achieve that maintained-tree look that's so popular with the kids these days. The cats have got their new walking jackets, which will mean feline romps in the yard, safely tethered so that grasshopper pursuits and rodentially murderous rampages don't get out of hand. This will be Julep's first spring since she was a wild ball of small fluff in the forest; I expect--nay, demand!--capering mayhem. Bob, an old paw at this sort of thing, will hang out on the deck and sneak down to the lawn to eat grass until she pukes, then eat some more.

Inside the Manor, there are walls to be smashed and replaced with other walls that are exactly the same, only newer and flatter and less completely covered with ungodly amounts of wallpaper paste and spackle.

This begins our second Spring here, and this time we'll be slightly more prepared. Grass and tree planting happens straightaway; siding smashing and porch building as soon as the rainy season ends, followed by a long slog of scraping, sanding, and painting.

Then it will be time to neglect raking the leaves and tuck in for another frozen doze.

I'm not sure what it means when I'm already anticipating next winter at the end of this one, other than that time is speeding up, hurtling me towards death with greater acceleration each passing year.

Gah!

This is what you get when the Big Brain's gears are stripped, and when it's not actually being paid to produce anything.