The Strategies of March
by Duncan Sprattmoran
With March spring begins to tease us, the lakes are frozen solid and the
sun makes it higher into the sky each day. March is also the month we all
suffer cabin fever in a major contagious dose. You go to the super market
to buy some oranges from Florida for some vitamin C and come home to find
you've contracted a bad case of the cabin fever blues. The four walls of
the house are too tight, the couch too hard, and your true love is just
as blue as you, and so you really don't want to do the things you have to
do. Even sex and cooking become strained in March when you know the sap
is pooling in the bottom of the roots but hasn't started to rise yet and
there's nothing to buy but rutabagas, beets and potatoes.
But the sun does begin to shine, and with each extended afternoon, the blues
begin to boil and you think that you could take the funky sap that runs
through your veins and boil it down into the quintessence of sweet. On sunny
March days I walk through the house naked, warmed by the heat pouring through
the windows. I pretend it is summer even though the thermometer may not
even read over twenty. And on those days when the ice begins to melt, the
sun to shine more brightly than it did in January, the chickadees to flit
around as if the spring has come, I begin to imagine that winter has really
come to an end, that the verdancy of May when trillium and morels spring
from the leafmold will be here in just a few days.
But tomorrow is bound to be cold again and the clouds will lower, a grey
ceiling that presses down on the treetops, and now instead of snow, which
at least redeems us all with the prospect of skiing, rain falls. And the
rain is cold, grayer than the clouds, and the house grows chilly despite
the furnace putting out the heat, and the self wants nothing but to run
unfettered through a blossoming world. In March in northern Michigan the
garden of Eden is a cruel dream which we wake from and remember through
out the day. Sin becomes a fantasized possibility, a smorgasbord of sensuality
the cold precludes. Wanting to fall in love, we drink too much beer and
say stupid things to our friends and go home and rue our words within the
insulated confines of our walls. Wanting easy redemption, we pour through
the catalogs and charge to the limit of our gold cards.
This afternoon the light was golden and these stratagem were at worst banal
and at best reinforced the deleterious effects of the weather. I daydreamed
the afternoon away, imagining all I could do once the weather gets better,
where I could go once the ice leaves the roads. For a case of cabin fever
I retreat into my studio and throw paint, tear paper, strum wildly on my
guitar, hammer on the keyboard hoping to make some sense of the malaise
which grips me. Each of these things works to pass the time, to make me
forget the inexorable fact that winter is still here by the calendar (remember
that summer when Pinatubo blew up and it frosted in July).
And yet I can never fully fool myself into believing there is a cure for
cabin fever. There's really nothing you can do but read a good book, drink
some tea, crawl deeper under the blanket and believe summer must follow
winter, that the complement to the blues are naval oranges, sweet as a sentimental
remembrance, thick skinned as the best of them.
And on those days when the temperature climbs and the sun brings sweat to
the brow, I think: "I've made it somehow, survived yet another case
of cabin fever".
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