chinesepal’s blog

The crocus and daffodils will soon start peeking their heads above last year’s pine bark nuggets and what’s left of the winter snow still piled in the beds under the white pines out by the road.

They are yet another prelude to the appearance of more flowers and birds: the warblers and the tanagers that will shortly appear in the trees around my home.

I can’t wait to inhale the aromas of things like the warming earth, new mown grass, and fresh piles of damp cedar mulch. And I am looking forward to that first morning when I can sit outside on my deck with a cup of coffee and feel comfortable without having to don a fleece or a heavy woolen shirt.

Whatever your passion in life, take time like the busy King Solomon to pause from it for a moment over the next few weeks and just sit and watch and enjoy the spectacle of spring unfold before your eyes.

And give thanks.

For most kids it’s simply a time when they can play outside longer, riding their new bicycles and skateboards or shooting hoops in driveway basketball courts. For some adults it can be a serious time, a release from the seasonal depression caused by the reduced hours of sunlight during the dark months of winter.

But for most of us, it is a release from the mundane things that after three months have added up to the point where we are all just ready for a change. You know: things like having to wear layers of heavy clothing, white-knuckle drives to work on icy roads, and leaving home mornings in the dark only to drive back home again in darkness later the same afternoon.

Man has always been fascinated with the arrival of spring. King Solomon weighed in on it when he wrote these words from his “Song” in the Old Testament: “See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land. The fig tree forms its early fruit; the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.”

The arrival of spring has always marked a rebirth of sorts, not just for nature but also for us humans. It is a time of awakening, a time to forget the old and to embrace the new.

A pair of hooded mergansers suddenly appeared on our lake earlier this month and I heard the unmistakable call of a wood duck. Several thousand feet overhead, an enormous, migratory flock of Canada geese undulated like strands of limp black thread suspended against a steel gray sky; their wild honking clearly audible in spite of the flock’s altitude.

Just a little more than one week ago, as I came to a place in the woods where the forest suddenly yields to what is a wild flower meadow in the late spring and summer, the bare trees were filled with hundreds of red-winged blackbirds, their cacophonous chatter filling the otherwise still morning air. It was an eerie harbinger of spring, reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Birds.” Later that same afternoon, a small flock of cedar waxwings, another migratory species of songbirds stopped for a rest in a nearby tree only two blocks from our house.

The waterfall behind our house at the lower end of Lake Edenwold is a thundering cascade of spring runoff from the melting snows of winter. It’s been a three-week drum roll leading up to today, when the cymbal will crash and the earth will arrive at that point in its orbit around the sun where it will be light for as many hours as it will be dark.

Today is really the celestial climax to a prelude whose crescendo has been growing now for a month in the forests and lakes all around us. Beginning in late February and through the month of March on my Saturday morning hikes through the lower Highlands, I have watched spring slowly unfold before my eyes.

Nora’s open disapproval of the wife came from feelings she didn’t know how to control. She was not prepared to have her place in Earnest’s heart usurped so abruptly. She’d anticipated Earnest eventually finding a young woman, perhaps one of her friend’s daughters from England. Somehow the years passed too quickly; Earnest grew up far too soon, before she expected it or had a chance to accept the transition. She had no other children to stand in his place in her heart at the loss of this one.

Nora prayed to God daily that she would find an increase in patience for her daughter-in-law. But when she could see the need for acceptance and reassurance in the girl, she pushed her farther away instead of gathering her in. Nora knew this was not the right thing to do, but somehow she could not help herself. Not only had Emily come into her home and stolen her son, but her husband and any and all other men who were about could not keep their eyes away from Emily either. Nora’s well-kept and efficiently maintained good looks were no longer enough to awaken the men’s interest – not with Emily’s smoking, newly awakened sexuality among them.

It was not the girl’s fault men found her so remarkable, so desirable. There was a scarcity of women in and around Fort Calgary, unless one wanted to choose a native bride, and few had looked in that direction as yet. The Fort had only been in operation since 1888 – it was the same age as that girl out there! – carving a foothold for commerce and peaceful existence out of the former wilderness.

It had not been long since herds of buffalo roamed the same hill that marched up towards the south, outside the house. Now, the beautifully scenic frontier town had new hordes to contend with; the impending arrival of a million inhabitants over the next century.

Sure, they did their job, but they also seemed to have underlying plans, most of these men. They were eager to make an impression, to keep order in the community and the countryside. But at the same time they were taking a look around, thinking about what part of that same countryside they’d like to own, what they would like to raise on the farmsteads and ranches they envisioned.

Behind the young couple’s back, Nigel and Nora had secretly cheered the young girl’s resolve to have her own house. They were relieved to have their own space back. They’d gotten used to the quiet of their home, just the two of them, when Earnest was back East for his training.

The area was deceptive and treacherous weather-wise. A detail of men could set out early on a beautiful summer day for a rendezvous with outlying settlers, only to limp home, demoralized, in a driving blizzard a few hours later. No one knew how to deal with the weather this area dealt out. Extremes ranged from far below freezing in the winter – temperatures that make it impossible to draw a breath and take any benefit from it – to summer temperatures so hot it’s impossible to move an inch from the weight of the heat on the body.

But beautiful! Every moment, it was beautiful! And there was no crowding, no class definitions, no beggars on the streets or drunkards in the pubs. Just about everybody here seemed to be a hard working, deep thinking, progressive spirited individual. Nigel well knew how hard it was to find an individual under a uniform in peacetime. But he also knew how many young men, even older ones like himself, used the Northwest Mounted Police as a means to an end.

Mr. Harding was not really a Lordship, but had the pretensions of one. He would have been, if not for the meaninglessness of being born a fifth son of a petty nobleman. Emigration to Canada had seemed preferable to Nigel Harding over penniless obscurity in dear old England. He often decried his circumstances, a mere hireling with a uniform. And a horse, if the beasts could only stay alive in this cursed climate! A far cry from the Lord of the Manor in a much more genteel existence than the one he and Nora endured in Canada.

Fort Calgary, this Godforsaken outpost they’d been assigned to when the Harding men answered a recruiting poster in the shipping office five years before, in London, left a lot to be desired. The Hardings seemed unable to completely acclimatize themselves to the altitude, about twenty five hundred feet above sea level. Or to the harsh extremes of temperature. Not fit for man nor beast; no wonder the bloody horses couldn’t stay alive!