MARCH!

I don’t like March. First of all, the name.

March.

It’s a one word imperative sentence.

I see a mean sergeant in a field, whistle hanging round his neck. He’s shouting at me, the overweight, winter-worn GI trying to rouse myself from the deep sludge of January and February, my uniform bursting its buttons, my fly stopped halfway in its tracks by flab.

I am not up for Marching. I can’t. In fact, I’ve just been able to start walking without a cane. I’m Persephone, just back from her abduction by a convalescence-comfortable sofa and a wide screen. The trim physical therapist explains that my leg muscle cells aren’t smooth anymore. They are more like a mushed up bowl of spaghetti. 

Along Highway 19, metal beasts have surfaced from the underworld. Uprooted grey trees litter the hillsides with amputated limbs, twisted fingers. A rural two-lane must double its size. Businesses and houses disappear, leaving in their places red mud flats indented with Caterpillar tracks. Traffic backs up for half a mile, from Li’l Smoky’s Barbecue to the junction of 19. Tempers flare.

I am not ready for this. The trees are starting to bud. There is a jar of daffodils on my kitchen sill. Still, I long for the white isolation of winter, for the cold, for the sense that the world can wait, because it has to. Give me some pale green days of April. Don’t push me, and I May. I love the sound of May. Full of possibility, no pressure. Just make a choice or even choose not. May gives you permission, like a door swinging wide.

The dog barks, her beagle-bugle sounding the arrival of a large vibrating truck. The floorboards in the bathroom quake; in the bedroom, the roaring continues followed by monotonous back-up beeping. Then it starts: the drone of power saws, a cartoon dentist drill amplified by a wall of speakers. 

Obviously our neighbors have a Spring project going on. I go to the cupboard for ibuprofen to head off the migraine that’s creeping up my neck like a tight hood. Light hurts my eyes. I wish I were a mole burrowed in the loamy quiet ground, listening to a neighboring flower stretch itself cautiously, patiently toward the sun.

 cathy larson sky    2015