The browner bits are slowly sloughing off as tiny green shoots emerge, slowly, slowly, signaling a far more careful start to spring this year. Looking back to last spring our backyard shrub had fragrantly burst with lilacs, there were multicoloured tulips aplenty and even the first little herb seeds were breaking out with tiny leaves by this point.
The psychology of the Canadian winter is complicated, bound up with our identity, our history and our perverse love/hate of the true north strong and free at minus thirty degrees with windchill. And relief from the last long months is always too long in the coming, as we anxiously await the great bipolar moment of our annual spring awakening (itself a prelude to a sweltering summer, but nevermind...). For anything is better than the waiting, the in-between-ness of a cool spring season, too cool for gardening (that great Canadian palliative to weather extremes), and yet warm enough to entice us outside, where our conversation quickly turns to how much warmer it was last year, as we zip up our light jackets to stave off the air's lingering chill.
And yet our patience is always rewarded, or it is for those with the industry and inclinations of that other season, the one for wandering and playing, swimming and cottages, yard work and the family vegetable patch, the smell of lilacs bursting forth, the first wave of colour and the feeling of life again on display after cold dark months in hiding.
All that to say, this weekend the patio furniture is going out (for isn't the first beer in the sun on a Saturday afternoon the real proof of spring's awakening?).
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