Limbo

The beginning of May is always at one point, inevitably, craptastic. It doesn't matter how warm it is before or after, there's a point of cold and snow in which the month flips a cosmic coin between murky and warming toward late spring into summer. This year, it was on the very first day. The Road was closed for four hours whilst snowflakes the consistency of paper mache covered the world. As an upshot, it got the snowpack for our drainage to one-hundred percent of average.

This is the time of year that things seem to be suspended in amber and tar, yet accelerating to lightspeed all at once. It is the tail-end of mud, and what a muddy mud it's been. Merchants go on their vacations and restaurants will close their doors for days at a go to get all gussied up for the summer season. In our Sahel the narrow-gauge railroad has started again and the first of the tour buses filled with visiting Chinese, seniors, or Russians looking for pointyland adventure have started to arrive. Flower buds get ready to bloom and we prepare to mix up hummingbird food.

It's the time of year when it's still cool enough to warrant fires and keeping the windows shut. There's a certain stuffiness about the house, which Sabina blames on the hounds, and not without reason, but I catch it from also the cats, ferrets, even the two of us. The scent of being closed up all winter and mud. I itch to throw open the windows, crack the doors, light some incense, and allow the perfumes of the outdoors permeate the premises.

There are ticks and butterflies. A kaleidoscope of  shifting aviary characters at the bird feeder. Looking at the mountainsides, one can see a strata based upon elevation; dirty diamonds, faded khaki, and the encroaching of the most brilliant of emeralds. All of this, suspended in an indefinable moment as the cyclic wheel holds its breath before starting to spin once more. These are the rhythms of limbo.