Beastly Behavior

            I was in a shop the other day – no need to name it, but any woman who has been in it might recognize which shop it was – looking at some attractive serving trays painted with designs of olive trees, lemon groves, vegetables, and so on, when the proprietor of the shop approached and to my utter astonishment put his arm around my shoulders in an intimate manner and whispered in my ear, “It’s melamine.” He chuckled, tugged tighter, and whispered, “You remember melamine. All of us who were around then remember it.”

            I mumbled something incomprehensible, although to tell the truth, I had no idea what melamine was and I was so astonished at the intimacy of his salesmanship I didn’t know what to say. He whispered something else about the product, then was gone. Later, when I was looking at something else, he again scurried up and hugged me close to whisper something about it before darting off again.

            I mean, really! Hadn’t he been listening to the news? Wasn’t he aware that those are not socially acceptable behaviors towards women he doesn’t know – and even, depending on the woman and the circumstances, to some he does know? What right did he think he had to put his arm around me, a complete stranger, and whisper in my ear not only things about the product he was selling, but insinuations about my age? Incredulity was so great it blocked anger at the insult.  

            The man’s wife (I assume she was his wife) was watching him from behind the counter, eagle-eyed. Had she never said to him, at home, while she was preparing dinner, “You really shouldn’t treat our women customers like that,” to which he would have replied, “Oh, I’m not doing any harm. They like it.” And how would he know I didn’t like it? Would he have noticed my slight shrinking from his chummy arm? Maybe he thought I would be flattered by those attentions. I saw him put his arm around another woman customer, but I doubt he would do that to a male customer. When he chatted with a young couple also looking at items, he proved the salacious nature of his gestures with me by not putting his arm around this young woman. Her male companion was a barrier.

            I could have made a scene by demanding he take his hands off me (“You beast!”), and I probably at least should have turned immediately and walked out of the store, but I continued to browse, and in the end, because I liked it, not because I had been flattered into buying it by the selling techniques of the store owner, I bought the melamine tray, the one with a large olive tree spreading its branches over half the plate. Every time I look at it, I see, in the thick olive-green branches, a pruriently peering, luridly lurking satyr.

The Lion and the Lamb of March

            Oh, how the March lion roared last night, flexing her muscle and exhibiting her power as the wind hurtled down the ridge. This morning she must be sitting satisfied on the mountain, licking her paws, letting the rain fall thickly, watching the snow deepen on the ski trails.

            What has happened to the lamb? He was here earlier this month, several times, bringing to the valley daffodils, primroses, and pink blossoming trees; to the woods fawn lilies, shooting stars, and hound’s tongue; everywhere sunshine, warm temperatures, and blue skies, only to be chased away by the lion again and again. He must be hiding in the trees at the edge of the pasture this morning, shivering with cold. He only has a week to reappear, if he is going to usher March out.

            But maybe I shouldn’t put too much faith in the wise sayings of old. It’s true that March came in like a lion this year, but there’s no guarantee the lion won’t see March out, too. There’s no more assurance that March will come in like a lion and go out like a lamb than that a groundhog's shadow on February 2 means there will be six more weeks of winter. How can we believe the saying, anyway, since Alaska will surely have more than six weeks of winter, whether February 2 is a clear day or not, and spring in Pennsylvania, where the saying originated, surely comes later than it does in Georgia?

            “Red sky at night: sailors’ delight. Red sky in the morning: sailors take warning” is a proverb I pay attention to, and, apparently, there’s some truth to it, as meteorologists explain with details too complex to go into here. However, on a camping trip long ago, when I was still naïve about backpacking and about weather, too, I guess, as I had depended on Oregon’s fair summer weather and hadn’t packed a tent, I looked at a pink evening sky, repeated the proverb, and went to sleep in the open air instead of setting up a tarp for shelter. Later that night I woke up with a light rain pelting my face. At that point I added a verse to the proverb: “If the sky is pink, better think.”

            The new moon in the old moon’s arms is supposed to indicate fair weather, a conclusion easy to understand, since visibility is good when there are no clouds or fog, whether we’re looking across the mountains or into the sky. My delight in seeing this phenomenon doesn’t have anything to do with knowing the weather will be fair tomorrow but because that shimmering silver crescent with the thin rim of light around the black bulb that is the moon is so beautiful. The astronomers tell us we are seeing the dark part of the moon, but what I am seeing is the new moon in the old moon’s arms.  

            The lion of winter will come as she will, then she will leave and let the lamb have the day. I have known years when I’m building a fire in the stove in June. Snow on Easter Day is not unusual in southern Oregon. A long, wet spring might sound dreary, but foul weather is beautiful when we know it’s helping a 50-percent-less-than-normal rainfall catch up to normal. And, inevitably, the lamb will chase the lion away. Spring always comes.

When the Days Grow Longer

        When the light returns, when the days grow longer and the dark withdraws like a melting snowman, day by day, everything in nature seems to waken. The trees shake themselves and lift their heads. Even before their leaves emerge, even before the buds become blossoms, we can tell the trees have been roused from sleep. To look closely at an alder, an ash, or a cottonwood in early March is to see a naked-limbed winter tree, but to see the same trees in a grove from a distance is to discern a delicate wash of light green so subtle under the predominant red-brown fuzz of swelling buds that it strains credulity to believe it's there. Flowers that have slept wrapped in their bulbs for months pop up to see what the light has brought, rubbing sleep from their eyes before turning their faces to the increasing sun. Insects stir one by one, and birds fly in with the light, singing at dawn and signing the air with curlicues and swooping flourishes like a calligrapher drunk with joy

        Up here on the mountain things sleep longer than they do in the valley. Two weeks before my daffodils smile at the sun, I see the same variety massed deeply yellow in Joan's garden. While my plum tree is no more than a ruddy suggestion of the later pale pink explosion, in the valley pink and white fruit trees are already adding a pastel frill to the streets and yards. 

        This seasonal difference is not a function of light. I have the same number of hours of daylight as anyone else at my latitude, the same increasing number of minutes day by day until at last we think not of day as a crack of light between the dark but of night as a blink of the shutter before the next day photo. This process begins on winter solstice, of course, but at such a minuscule pace we bank more on faith than on observation that the light will return. Then, so gradually we can't see it coming, the pace increases until, just anterior to the spring equinox, the ball of light is rolling so fast we cannot but get swept in its path. Like the rest of nature, our spirits lift as though from sleep.

        And then, once awake, we have to prove to the cosmos we weren't sleeping on the job, so we tinker with the clock as though with time itself. But now daylight savings time, or the reversal of it, is so ordinary I can't remember which is the real time and which the manipulated. Some people despise daylight savings time, calling it unnatural, but clock-keeping itself isn't natural. Shifting the clock at our will is only a pretense at control. Adding an hour of light to the evening necessarily adds an hour of dark to the morning, and, in real terms, nothing has changed. As Ursula LeGuin said in a poetic variation of a truth of physics, "To light a candle is to cast a shadow." Whether you like the autumn version of the manipulated clock or the spring version depends on who you are and what you do. In the fall, school children don't have to wait for the bus in the dark, but my neighbor looks forward to the spring-ahead day so she can be feeding her horses in the daylight again. I myself have no preference and have a hard time keeping track of when I'm supposed to change my clocks, although these days most clocks change on their own, mysteriously more aware of the legislated time than I. The light comes as it comes, whatever we do to the clock, and with the coming of the light, I feel an awakening, a resurrection. Lake pagans of old, like daffodils, I turn my face to the sun and worship.

Winter-at-Last

            The old hippy saying, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it,” implies that I’ll be sorry when I have to walk up the hill in the snow and shovel a snow-path to the woodshed and bundle up in gloves and scarves just to chop a bit of kindling to build my fire in the morning.        

            Nope. I’m not sorry. I wanted snow, and at last I got snow, and I’m happy as a bear in a lair.

            At last I don’t feel like I wasted my money putting studded snow tires on my four-wheel-drive RAV4, and I don’t feel foolish when I drive into town. I feel proud. “Yes,” I think as I pass other cars on the road, “I have studded snow tires because I need them.” I am proud of the eight inches of snow on the roof of my car that announces to passers-by, “See? I live where it snows!” Envy and admiration trail behind me like a “just married” banner.

            I always get a thrill, when I’m driving up the mountain towards home, to pass, a mile and a half before my house, a “snow zone” sign. At last, this winter, I can pass it with justifiable pride, as the snow really does begin just past the sign. Any year, to drive into town in March or April is to move into spring, with fruit trees, daffodils, and flowering ornamentals studding the streets and lawns with color. During heavy-snow, cold-winter years, to drive back up the mountain into the snow zone, where patches of snow cling to the earth and everything is damp and cold, sets me, heart sinking, back in winter. (Yes, I do like spring after a good hard winter). This week I pass the sign and think, “I live in the snow zone.”

            At last, this winter, I can wear my favorite winter coat (fake-leather, fake-fur), and my long wool cloak when I go somewhere dressy. I wear a hat, a scarf, and gloves whenever I go outside not so much because I need them but because it’s so much fun to wear them at last. I change clothes twice a day so I can enjoy my winter clothes more.

            Skiing has at last been good again. “This,” I thought as I skied with the Grants Pass Nordic Club through densely falling snow and finger-biting cold up a mountain, remembering my diatribe about spring too soon (see post on Feb.8) – “this is more like it.”

The next week-end, whizzing gracefully, effortlessly down the trail at Buck Prairie, was like being a winter song on the mountain.

            I didn’t get more than a foot of snow at my house, but it whitened the woods and decorated the trees with its beauty. The flakes were so glitteringly tiny I took a video of the them falling in my woods, one of my favorite sights (and sites). I tried skiing out my back door, but the snow was so soft and fluffy it wouldn’t support my skis, so I walked instead. My feet, in ski boots and gaiters, whisked through powdery snow. The wind blew globs of snow off trees onto my wool hat. After a while I realized I was following animal tracks, more like paw prints than hoof prints: not deer prints, and too small for cougars but too big for squirrels or skunks. I would like to think they came from two coyotes, maybe. I would really like to think they were paw prints of OR 7 or some of his brood, but that’s a little far-fetched. I followed the prints all the way to the creek, ducking under the same chinquapin hanging over the road with icy limbs the animals had hunkered under, walking around frozen puddles with the prints, but walking around another downed tree that the animals could squeeze under but I couldn’t.

I stopped at the creek. The hopping stones across it had snow on them and looked slippery. I could see the tracks on the other side of the creek, but at this point woman and creature parted ways. I turned around and walked back home through the beautiful, soft, pure-white snow of winter-at-last.