In late fall, I saw a woman raking with not one hand clapping, so to speak, but two of these wicker things going at once. As she put aside one of these two rakes while beside a garbage bin, not a wicker basket, for only that purpose, she added that the Farmers Almanac had predicted that this winter would be one of the most trying, in multiple ways such as snow, than any in recent times. And now the cold has arisen and reclaimed its spot as the season to be reckoned with.
Jump forward to this slowly (in most ways) oncoming spring, and there was the neighbor who stepped rather eagerly forward to chat, and said in his immediate recall was the past Easter, in addition to the 2021 version where people were forging out for in-person worship, that was not very hot but did feature four inches of snow, and he streamed a service on his computer, and a message (from above?) came to him out of the blue: Jesus will wash away what the weather brings, toward salvation, virus or no virus, religion or naught. And this season, the temps again hit 80 like in a Sunday long ago, only two days later.
And rakes again? A neighbor of mine, not hers, had two of them — or were they shovels as I forget from being in the moment — and between them was filtered a springlike message cloth. The evening before, the local man cave/garage was going again in absentyism via a well-worked outdoor patio, with some people leaving shortly after about Two Minutes to Midnight and the rest lingering like the Angels In The Tomb (sorry to get so religious with that reference to another cave). And the very next day, the tell-tale scooter was out and parked sideways in front of the garage door, another harbinger of spring, even moreso then All The Small Trees at a roadside park just to the north that always seems to be a deeper green on days the virus was closer to being curbed. And at the nearby Bible Baptist parsonage, the eggs late hanging from tree branches were along the last lines of two dozen.
And with that, oddly, the local church lady’s family had leftover only a dangling green participle in a token birch tree, where Easter messages always abounded, maybe a backhanded ode to the virus? After citrus salad of the upcoming summer, I’m guessing, the clan was out shoveling dirt around the token remaining tree to keep moving forward with their rejuvenation project Way Out Front, where there had not been more bushes since almost the Bush presidency. Still had thought they looked cool. Making me look really bad in a Keep Up With The Jones style.
Across the cul de sac, the mound of snow created by village plows was long gone, like the mountains that Led Zeppelin says were washed away. In there place were makeshift forays of touch football and batting practice, as the guy who was a switchhitter struck out from the right side but nailed a could-be-a-double with a shot just to the left of second base, when doubling up as a lefty.
The weather again went sour, in this case very cold, for the Unfrost Your Nuts motorcycle rally, and in this case I think that testosterone was diminished to highway-to-the-danger-zone type proportions, as these parts were exposed to really frigid leather, despite the presence of much lace. So what’s a biker to do? Hit the Kwik Trip for snacks, between revving engines to well above speed limit again in what testosterone was left, and in keeping with recent court decrees at state, few of them were with masks. An exception from a few days before was an Easterish biker chick so covered in black label leather that all skin, even around her face, was covered to the point that it became hard to see if she was Caucasian. Not as if this bit of content matters.
The mountain of snow across the way from the house is long gone, as are in very recent times the other remnants of winter maintenance. The orange sticks in the stone that showed where next to a sidewalk you would find something like a fire hydrant have been removed even before the latest dusting of snow, and rose up a full three feet just in case the Farmer’s Almanac was right. Even that might not have been enough, as more height was needed and the manufacturing of said two feet more were outsourced to a place where they know snow — Siberia! But this offer was withdrawn as it might give the Russians another foothold in elections that are still more than three years away. OK, I made all that up. With these are gone from the scene the gnarly looking pink-orange piles of pothole fill you’d see here and there on paths to and from the bars. Did actually, somebody party a bit too much?