Daylight saving rings in the body like an alarm — wake up, wake up! — shaking me out of my bed and heralding the arrival, sudden as a snap of the fingers, of the most chipper months of the calendar year. It happens annually, with clockwork precision, and I’ve come to recognize it as a mild but chronic case of seasonal mania: I will be unshakably cheery between now and June. Spring puts a stupid spring in my step. I can’t help it. I trot quickly down the sidewalk, hurrying along my little dog as she lingers by the purple crocuses, sniffing the tree trunks. I sing a foolish tune: “When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along.”
It seems unreasonable that we should be ruled by the transit of the sun, but we are (or I am, at least).
February and early March were grueling. I hate to be a complainer.
It felt like the banks and drifts of snow were pressing up against the sides of the house, constricting, oppressing, forcing me into a smaller and smaller circle of existence. I spent the week following the Great Blizzard not even just in front of the glow of the fire in my living room but sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray on my lap, sipping ginger tea (the kind formulated for people with sour stomachs) and attempting to turn the screen display on my MacBook laptop brighter and brighter, even though it was already at max.
I had a houseguest this weekend who inquired, as if philosophically, but I think a bit more along the lines of a hint-hint: “Does lying down have the same implications as prolonged sitting, for your health?” This friend and I had decided, at my lazy suggestion, that instead of driving out to the Sag Harbor Cinema to watch the documentary “My Undesirable Friends,” we should stay home, prepare a starch-heavy meal, and then prop ourselves up on elaborate scaffolds of pillows with tin lap trays (Valentino as “The Sheik” for me and Dutch tulips for her) to eat an early dinner and then rewatch the first season of “Wolf Hall.” That was Friday night. By Monday morning, the sky was blue, the clocks had sprung forward, and I was dodging around the muddy field where in November my lawn had been, surveying the debris left by three winter storms, singing like Al Jolson: “What if I’ve been blue? Now I’m walkin’ through fields of flowers! Rain may glisten but, still I listen for hours and hours. I’m just a kid again, doin’ what I did again, singin’ a song! When the red, red, robin comes bob, bob, bobbin’ along!”
Have I mentioned that the family of seven deer — seven! — who call my back garden home had bedded down during Winter Storm Fern, at the end of January, under the camellias that grow hard up against the side of my exterior bedroom wall? It’s true. They created a sort of nest in the snow right there beside the wall that holds the spigot and coiled garden hose and left impressive piles of black droppings in heaps on the snow that covered the patio. I’m not sure where they hid during the Great Blizzard a month later. I didn’t see them at all for a week; the only footprints in the over-the-knee snow belonged to me and to the intrepid delivery man from McCoy Fuel. But the deer had returned by Monday morning, making sure to be promptly on hand to search and destroy each and every spring blossom that suddenly was nodding its bonny head in the light breeze.
The snowdrops were three inches high in the back garden, somehow, miraculously, by noon Monday. They must grow at a ferocious rate. (I imagine them singing, too, as they shimmy their shoulders skyward: “There’s a bluebird on my shoulder.”) I ran out the back kitchen door in my stocking feet, getting my pink cashmere socks all wet and muddy, and shouted insults at the young buck who had turned up to eat the snowdrops even before they had seen a full day in the sunshine. The buck was unruffled. If I’m honest, I threw an orange at him in a feeble attempt to chase him away. He looked at me with disdain. (I know, write a letter to the editor. Columnist admits hurling citrus fruit at innocent ruminant. Sue me.)
And now the spring cleanup will commence. So far, despite my daylight-saving-time burst of energy, all I have accomplished in regard to re-beautifying the yard is having re-propped a pair of rusty children’s bicycles back up against the side of the barn; dragged the unsightly green giant of a garbage bin back into the shed behind the house; ripped up and discarded a circle of chicken wire installed to protect an oak sapling that, optimistically planted last summer, died last fall, and thrown an orange at a deer.