"I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and somehow survives...Paradox and bedrock."-Edward Abbey

07 May 2013

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.

9 comments:

  1. Damn Robbie...you sure have an amazingly poetic way of describing May. You have a gift my friend.

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  2. I imagine you can do the very same thing with summer and autumn and with autumn and winter. You have a gift.

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  3. We've had the door open all day. It's been a nice, not so windy day, though our outdoor bowling was interrupted by a couple of rebellious gusts. Tomorrow, we'll be closing everything up, shutting out the rain and cold. We have limbo every day, all year, I think.

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    1. And by the weekend I'm hoping to have the door open. maybe even a window. We got some garden starts and I'm excited.

      Perhaps transition is a better adjective?

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  4. No limbo here, just a quick descent into Hell; the Gates have opened early this year...

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    1. Ah, but there are parts of Hell which make Antarctica, nay, Pluto, look temperate...

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    2. Somewhere around the 9th Circle, I believe--which sounds really good right about now as I swelter in the heat and humidity.

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