Is it Spring Yet?

It’s been a long winter in Iowa. Spring arrived for a couple of days and then disappeared, leaving us cold and peevish, reaching for  hats and scarves and puffy coats grossly overdue for cleaning. Things in my garden poked up and stalled, like the peonies behind the grumpy angel. There have been many inaccurate predictions, causing some sour feelings for my weather app with its highs and lows and rolling graphics of wind and rain and lightning. Clouds with snowflake designs were on the forecast for yesterday, but fortunately did not manifest in the real world. I don’t know why I was surprised it was cold again today. It’s supposed to warm up tomorrow, according to the forecast.

People sometimes ask how my writing is coming and I want to say that it’s very  much like the weather itself. Unpredictable. My work in progress (WIP) which is a novel about memory, aging, and all the deep emotional sparks that fuel and forge our own personal histories, lives and grows in its own cloud place, where I haul it out of its virtual sky and shape and form it according to the atmosphere of my day. My writing could use a weather app of its own. I see it, in my mind’s eye, with images rising up and down on a daily bell curve of distractions to avoid: a whirlpool image for the news on particularly bad days, twitter as a literal mine field (most days), Facebook littered with the siren call of shoe ads on days that I might be vulnerable to such, and a cautionary IG!Flag to remind me that the worldwide Mirror, Mirror on the Screen may not always catch me in the best light. The app’s divination would have to include my own state of mind and willingness to work. It should intuit for me. I would just need to check it a lot–hourly, half hourly–to see if anything has changed. But that in itself would be so distracting.

I think I’d get better oracular visions from grumpy wings. In the meantime her RBF is always present to ask, “Is it spring yet?” which is merely code for “Are you working yet?”

I’m happy to let the weather be the distraction, spectacle that it always is. I can safely predict it will be some time before the I put the coats away. Enjoy the photos of the prairie beyond our yard. And happy spring wherever you are.