When I first started this blog, it was meant to be a remembrance of days past, since time seemed to seep all those childhood memories away. It kind of veered off into a tangent - life in the present and World Cup will do that to you - but the city and its heat wave has been so downright repressive I've been forced to retreat into my memories. Hence, memories of childhood springs in Winnipeg, below. I hope you enjoy my random thoughts and highly bipolar styles of writing displayed in this blog.
Winnipeg.
The first thing I remember are fields. Field after field after field, grassy expanses separated by lonely cement roads at distant and irregular intervals. Nothing disturbed the horizon, not really. The patches of trees, the lone barns and isolated islands of communities were swallowed up by the immense scale of the scene: ground stretched flat, flat, from east to west, as far as the eye could strain, the sky filling the space above, so uniform that it seemed to reach above infinitely. On the prairie, all houses become little.
If there were ever a place that truly and regularly contained four seasons, Winnipeg would be it. The essence - the extremes - of all four seasons, in one locale. In the summer, long waves of grass and growing green things beating in the wing; in the fall, golden sheafs shorn irregularly to the ground, charcoal columns of smoke billowing into the sky; in the winter, a tableau in shades of white, sky and air and ground alike, all filled densely with snow.
And spring.
The flower of Manitoba - a province named for the lakes and straits of the Great Spirit of the Algonquians - is the crocus. A phonetically harsh name for a such a delicate flower - petals arranged in an elongated cup, tapered on both ends, with a petite stem, often lilac, with a bright saffron center - but perhaps appropriate; it’s one of the first flowers to push its way up out of the frost in rocky and wild landscapes. It was always a great surprise to see life sticking out from tiny indents of melted snow, at a time when feet were still stuck in heavy insulated boots and thick nylon pants that crunched with every bend of the limbs - they were always in the most obscure and random of places. Maybe they were a providential reward for surviving yet another humanity-challenging winter, a heavenly placeholder for the life that would begin anew.
But whatever their meaning in the universe, for me, the sight of them is always associated with hope. Last summer, I saw tiny plastic pots of delicate crocuses at the Union Square farmer’s market, swaying lightly in the exhausting, humidity-laden wind; and my heart lightened instantly at the sight of those white and purple bobbing heads. As usual: in the most random of places, and never where you would think. Hope for life, in the deadening climax of either winter or summer.
(But it was a little sad, too; crocuses, like animals, should stay wild and free, roaming the soil of fallow fields, the rocky grounds - not a clod of sorry sod in a flimsy plastic carton.)
With the presence of fields and melting snow came the soil and mud. Everywhere. Black, loamy stuff - fresh earth, nothing like the stink of mulch that lines the base of city trees and flowerbeds in parks. Some of it, dried out by the wan but strengthening sun, could be lifted in clumps and crumbled into fine particles between the fingers, deconstructed, back to the ground: black peat, old thin roots, tiny stones. Some of it, made watery by the constant spring rains, ran between and over the slabs of the sidewalks, or were held in stasis in puddles deep as the shaft of our rubber boots. Inevitably, after every shower, the rain washed out - not the 'incy wincy spiders' of childhood rhyme - but legions of squirming pink earthworms.
They were moist and round, finely segmented and pink - and oh, so very long. Some of those prairie earthworms - I’ve never seen anything like it since. Tens of centimeters at a time, stretched out over the cement. Definitely the type that would make the perfect bait for the fat walleyes, whitefish, and pikes that dwelled in our rivers’ muddy waters.
I’d hop over them as best as I could, jumping from one empty expanse of pavement to another. There wasn’t much space. Everywhere were piles of flattened pink carcasses of the damned, little mushy mass graves of those tragic Annelida whom tiny children’s feet could not entirely avoid - or sadistically chose not to avoid. I, for one, tried my best to jump over them, but not entirely for their sake: mostly for the inevitable residue that would cling to the grooves of the soles, and the squelch that I imagined hearing each time my shoes accidentally fell on an unfortunate creature.
When the sun dried out all the rain, they would struggle across vast expanses of pavement onto which they’d been washed out, back to the cool comforts of the prairie earth. It was a race against time. I would watch in utter, appalled fascination as they inched their way blindly back to the scent of moist soil, silently goading them onward with the sheer force of my own will - if not for their sakes, for the sake of an unobstructed and unsoiled walk. If I had been braver, or less disgusted, I would have scooped them up, helped them back to the earth.
As it was, some made it; others did not. For at least a week afterwards, their dried carcasses would be laid out, almost unrecognizable in death, so drained of moisture and color and life, lining the roads like a Roman warning to all who dared to leave their proper place in the fields: your lives shall be forfeit.
Out of a reluctant and revolted respect, I avoided stepping on those, too.
A week later they were gone, either washed off by more rain, eaten by birds, or disintegrated to dust by light and wind back to the earth.
“In like a lion, out like a lamb. In like a lamb, out like a lion.”
The phrase that would ring out, insistent and recurrent as a tolling bell, as March and April rolled around. In school, we made masks out of paper plates, bits of construction paper, and lengths of elastic string as weather predictions of the coming spring. Mine was a lion, of course: holes cut out for the eyes, rounded triangle nose, red marker mouth, brown and yellow paper triangles stuck along the rim for an unruly mane. Even at the age, the seeds of cynicism had already planted, perhaps; or the deeply instinctive impression that bad news should come first, and the good, after.
Or perhaps, in sympathizing with the feline species, I was merely taping into my true nature as a child of the year of the tiger.
In any case, I was most often right: spring on the prairies almost always blows across the plains with untamed ferocity, windy and watery and wild. As it should.
“April showers bring May flowers.”
And the rain was indeed abundant, as if the heavens had been upturned and emptied out; and irregular, always unexpected. If there is anything that the denizens of the heart of the country learn better than anyone else, it is forbearance of the unforeseen, and the patience to wait in hope: from inside frost-etched windows, for winter to thaw; through waves of heat and fronds of green, for the harvest to come; from under the eaves, peering upwards for a break in the clouds, for the rain to stop.
But it was beautiful, that rain: clean and cold and good. It’s not what I’ve found rain in the cities to be: lukewarm mop water wrung from a cruel blank sky, fruitlessly attempting to wash off centuries of compressed layers of silt and grease and sweat of the city’s bones, pooling dark and stale and unlovely at the base of concrete buildings and branches of streets.
Rain in the country feels natural: unhindered by the cold bulk of buildings and high-rises, untainted by the industrial grime of cities, making its melody through the clatter of branches and rustle of leaves, tapping brightly on the rocky and sodden ground. Often you can see, above the low-hanging clouds, a hint of the sun above. In no other place but the Interior Plains would these clouds be, rather than a harbinger of gloom, a reminder of life: the skies open, beautifully, and then the prairies respond in turn, with plains bursting into green and fields blooming into colors seemingly overnight.
Those are the things I hold dear in my heart these days, when I’m held at bay in a city bus shelter by the heavy sheets of coal-grey rain and the sloppily man-made waves of dirty pooling water. Those are the things I recall in my bones, when the eastern summer air, oppressively thick with humidity and heat, resists the movement of limbs and breath. Those are the things that remind me that, in spite of it all, I was formed from that hardy provincial spirit: resilient, hopeful, and capable of being reborn.
I may be shaped by the city around me these days, but I will always have that prairie child’s heart.
Posts
Leave reply