from
smelling the snow (3)
Everything Howard Irwin
said about the early May freeze reminded Mrs. Scattergood of her life. If you’re working on improving the nature of
your relationship to the world and the nature of your relationship to
relationships you have to work on yourself. Something about this time of life
and the arguments with yourself are good.
If you’re going to be in an argument, the one with yourself is the one
to have. Yeats said it brings poetry.
~
“...lacking evolutionary experience to deal
with the ups and downs of a New England spring...” Irwin wrote about native
plants as opposed to exotics. Was Mrs.
Scattergood the exotic searching for and stretching towards the
unfamiliar? She stretched like a cat
that reaches out comfortably with the full length of its body. She saw no
reason to reach for anything. She just
wanted to feel the length of her own stretch. Yet this too could be an example
of someone lacking evolutionary experience.
It was unusual for her not to satisfy her feelings with something
immediate. The usual compensators in the past had been sex, food, smokes, talk,
even exercise. It seemed as if it were sudden change for her, but just sitting
with her feelings, not seeing any need to act on them was a good thing. “Moreover, native plants, in general respond
much more conservatively to spring warm-ups than exotics.” Could this
information clarify something for her?
‘Well, I’ve been here nearly long enough to count as native.’ However,
she thought, by New England standards she was definitely an exotic. Well, she was hardly that. But she wondered if she was still classified
as a gal or not. Maybe a gallon
considering the weight she accumulated in the last ten years. Why wasn’t she feeling lusty anymore? But she did think it clever that she was no
longer captive by her hormones.
~
So
much lost on desire. What can be saved
by it? Mrs. Scattergood wondered if she
touched the wild in some other way. At
that time her libido was wilder than ever. The salmon were jumping and flipping
orange to the sky gods. The frogs gurgling mud and river blood. The loons loony
and jiving on insects and little fishies that know the temperature of the river
is just right for swimming their little silver streaks in the sun. The water washed silt onto the banks leaving
crinolines of white foam in layers and layers that look post-coital and soft
with new plant plugs. It was rich with movement, flashes of silver and color,
broken rainbows and bubbles. No
participle, no fragmented, segmented aspect of her being was untouched by these
feelings; this suave, soothing and smoothing, dipping and dripping life,
mishpucha, life. And that is a good
thing. Not separate from her but a part
of it all. Knowing without knowing. Like
having the scent of snow coming.
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