Itō Takashi: Spring Snow at Kamikochi (1932)

"My boot lugs still carry soil they picked up last season …"

It's funny, but I don't remember this much variety in prior springs here. Snow spots the backyard this morning where The Muse and I planted her new Mirabelle trees yesterday afternoon. An almost fierce wind kept me off the scaffolding again and the cold will prevent me from painting today, forcing me back inside just after I'd started feeling the rhythm of this season. As if to throw my timing off, it's almost winter this morning, as I was finally prepared for spring. Of course our Colorado springtimes featured full-blown blizzards, but here in these gentler elevations and under Japanese Current influences, I just expected more consistency than this.

If I went back and checked, though, I suspect that the record would show just this slow build of the season, even including some SmallWinters in it. My memory's faulty. Rather than grab what I actually experience, my memory makes up some kind of mean experience, a floating average, though my actual experience might have wandered all over the thermometer. I apparently rob myself of variety for ease of storage, lobbing off the outliers before forgetting they ever happened. I swear that I conspire with myself to live in two dimensions rather than three or four. How utterly boring.

What would this SmallWinter have me do? Go back to hibernating again? Spend the day in bundled up contemplation? Carry on just as if it actually felt like spring? It will be spring either way, whether I spend my day retreating from the season or leading it again. I might have needed some semi-sacred interruption, something capable of disrupting easy achievement. I've noticed lately that whenever I set about to go someplace, it's suddenly suppertime for the cats. I don't mean some trumped up suppertime, but the actual one, so that I just have to stop and perform the serving ritual or go heartless. My rhythm broken then, I can feel free to head out on my excursion, but without the seamless transition. These ragged passages have been comprising my spring.

I'll very likely remember the sweet spring days rather than the snowy ones. I'll recall a season spent standing tall on the very top of my scaffolding, not one which also included me just deciding to sleep in because I couldn't do my work given the weather. I would not want to impugn this fine season by suggesting that it was not delivering. Within everything lies at least a spot of something else. Nothing's so pure as to even appear to be exclusively one thing and that thing only. It should be no different for spring or for any season, I suspect. Yesterday felt as blustery as November. Each forward step drags along a little leftover from the last. SmallWinters remind me of the truer nature of progress, of Reconning. My boot lugs still carry soil they picked up last season as they stride into this one.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Reconning, #PureSchmaltz