Covert Mom: Emotional Weather Report

Mariah Mottley

 

The second week of April and it is still snowing. Snow on the car last night. Snow on the car this morning. I don’t even use the ice scraper, just the windshield washer spray. I stopped bothering with gloves a month ago. This season reminds me of the end of the movie “Clue”. The first time Tim Curry’s dinner guests see a dead body they all freak out. By the end, they are so desensitized they barely bother with a facial expression as he runs down the hall with a candlestick over his head re-enacting the whole grisly evening. The snow on my car is another dead body at the end of a campy murder movie. I’m ready for the credits to roll.

Frequent as the snow has been, there is no accumulation, which has revealed the almost comical amount of debris in my yard. A ladder that tipped over in the wind after someone used it to do pull-ups. An extension cord connecting the horse water heater to the house. So much dog poop. And tennis balls, all brown. A deer leg bone. A headless rodent, a small purple plastic step stool. And, grass.

The potential energy is palpable. The birds are busy, shooting around, talking to each other, pairing up, playing house. They empty the feeder constantly. I pour sunflower seeds from Dedrick Farms into it like it’s my job, come home from work and do it again. There is movement in the grass. Birds, and squirrels, and I hope, soon, chicks. We have rare breeds on order from Iowa, their delivery on hold like the good weather. One freezing evening, unable to stand the house a second longer, I used the loppers to murdered several of the perennials around the house, cutting them nearly to the ground, then barehanding the branches over to the compost pile, the sky still leaden. As I dragged them across the yard I remembered vaguely the sound of the weedwhacker, the lawnmower. That couldn’t have been here.

The mare, my 30-year-old Fjord, leans over the fence, long since hip to the fact that the wire is not hot. She stretches her neck out, shoulder fur pressing through high tensile squares, straining to nibble the bits of grass just starting beyond the borders of her paddock. The grain in her bin lies untouched, her hay similarly ignored. She has had it with the same-old goddamned stuff, spreads it out and naps on it, waiting for the grass.

The grass, I notice on my way by (yet another can of sunflower seeds in hand, toes cold and sockless in my Muck Boots) is getting greener. Also, the pond is glassy, no longer opaque. The pond is liquid. As in not frozen. April in the Finger Lakes is best described by Roz Chast in the New Yorker cartoon which shows a man looking out his window on a dreary rainy day, the city represented with lines of rain covering it. The thought bubble above his head reads “April sucks”. The caption reads, “Beavis and Butt-head meet T.S. Eliot”.

April is the cruelest month because it is time wasted. This could have been a sunny day. I could have mulched the garden, fixed the nest boxes, I could have groomed the horses, cleaned out the barn, murdered some more perennials if the air didn’t hurt. In Manhattan, there are daffodils and ice cream trucks. Here, I have dog poop that sometimes defrosts. And a muddy mare bent on destroying my fence.

With a sense of foreboding, I checked the extended forecast. Partly cloudy, Monday, high of 41, Tuesday, low of 26, Wednesday high of 31, low 20. Thursday, high of 39, low 22. And then, I blink. Refresh the phone. Friday, sunny, high of 70. I check the location settings, just in case. Friday, high of 70. Sunny.

Consumed with a barely controllable urge to buy new shoes for all the children and to hire a landscape architect, a housepainter, a carpenter, and to order mulch, I keep refreshing the phone, just to see the numbers again. The daffodils will be blooming here. Soon. Soon.