Unsettled Weather

Ah, spring is here, I rejoiced the  last several days.  And, indeed the daffs and narcissus are up and beginning to bloom.  BUT when I looked out this morning the predicted rain for today was coming down in the form of white flakes, icy white flakes.  The ground was lighted sprinkled, my car needed brushing off, the very strong breeze -- or better said, wind -- was definitely wintery and out of the north. Nasty puffs from the mouth Boreas himself.

No, it didn't last long, the snow was gone in an hour and the sun tried to shine and succeeding for longer and longer periods.  I was rudely slapped back to the reality that it won't  be dependably spring until the end of the month but surely will be by then. The photo above was taken a couple of years ago just at the end of April when Rachel and I were walking  on a road not far away. It seems to me a perfect little patch of spring.  

This is a quiet week for me.  I skipped the foreign film yesterday because I saw it when it came out a few years ago and was not greatly impressed.  So I have two free days and have three projects in the works.  I like to work on more than one thing at a time: a quilting job, a writing job, and a "ugh" job, in this case, little efforts at spring  house cleaning.  Today it was mostly laundry and some sorting -- the big put away/get out closet change over it not going to happen for at lesat two weeks because the weather just isn't that dependable.  Tomorrow will be another day split between the jobs and I will have a sense of accomplishment by the end of the day. I think of Marge Piercy's poem about work in which she, the most practical and down to earth of her generation of women poets, says we need meaningful work -- as a pitcher needs to contain water. It's true. I like her simplicity and I like to feel I'm working, accomplishing something, getting a quilt made, writing (just now) a booklet of quotes for a friend's birthday, and doing the woman's work I learned about so long, long ago, keeping the house clean and relatively tidy. 

I do not understand people who can be satisfied (are they really?) with a day spent watching TV. I do understand poet Mary Oliver who wanders fields all day and then writes poems about them. Her careful attention to the natural life around her and it's translation into words that helps her readers see what she saw. I have been very much into reading and writing and thinking about poetry lately.  Yesterday a man in our poetry class read a poem describing childhood games of Monopoly with such vividness the ritualistic qualities that the audience had experienced as he did was made clear and took on a broader meaning of how we learned capitalism (although he did not say so in so many words until after the poem was being discussed).  Helping others see and understand is a poet's job -- a job as useful as a pitcher holding water.  I dislike my poems when they are far short of that goal.