Spring Fever

This is day six of spring. As of today, we have had winter for five months. I wish I could make peace with winter, I wish I could be like Dick Proenneke and actually prefer winter, but I don't. Maybe if I fully committed to a dog sled team I might be more amenable to this season. As it is I dream of a land where there are birds and greenery more than half of the time.

I enjoy what few birds there are here. Right now there are chickadees, and sapsuckers, magpies and red polls at the feeders.

Last week, on the first day of spring we got a snowstorm that snowed me in overnight. My driveway is as long as a city block and it was full of three feet of packed snow. The only thing that could plow me out was a highway grader. At a cost of course since we are entitled to no services in the country. It's all do-it-yourself, your own sewer, your own water treatment, your own garbage collection and recycling, your own furnace repair, drain maintenance and heating fuel supply, and it's all up to you. There are no services out here. You need to be resourceful and strong.

The quiet and solitude is a big incentive to living out here though.

Perhaps any dissatisfaction I have is spring fever. Here is what Mark Twain had to say about that:

"It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is. Yes, and it sets him to sighing and saddening around, and there's something the matter with him, he don't know what. But anyway, he gets out by himself and mopes and thinks; and mostly he hunts for a lonesome place high up on the hill in the edge of the woods, and sets there and looks away off on the big Mississippi down there a-reaching miles and miles around the points where the timber looks smoky and dim it's so far off and still, and everything's so solemn it seems like everybody you've loved is dead and gone, and you 'most wish you was dead and gone too, and done with it all.

Don't you know what that is? It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want -- oh, you don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! It seems to you that mainly what you want is to get away, get away from the same old tedious things you're so used to seeing and so tired of, and set something new. That is the idea; you want to go and be a wanderer, you want to go wandering far away to strange countries where everything is mysterious and wonderful and romantic. And if you can't do that, you'll put up with considerable less; you'll go anywhere you CAN go, just so as to get away, and be thankful of the chance, too."