While you weren't looking

Meanwhile, it became spring. Water gushes out, flows over and bites into the stalactite bearding the pipe. Snow recedes into redoubts and enclaves. We scan for hidden ice, and keep hands free so we can use our arms as wind-braced counterweights.

The green dot at 10 in my tide table says we "spring forward" this coming Sunday! Despite the signs of spring, I'm as irritated as every year that the clocks go forward as early as they do, a full two weeks ahead of the planet's cycle. 

And in our special place, I haven't forgotten the blizzard mid-March three years ago, when the whole town came to a standstill, with three or four feet of snow dumped in 24 hours. This old post has a couple photos of an emblizzarded moose down near the bottom.

Puts me in mind, too, of how special a thing it is to live in a place where what the tides are doing is important information, where tide table booklets are handed out by local businesses. How amazing it is that they can publish the tides for a whole year ahead and have them be so accurate. When the very word "fluctuate" comes from the word for "wave," amazing that the big-picture ocean is that predictable. I almost wish there were tide tables for other things in life, but that much predictability wouldn't be so good.

As this inkling-spring comes, even with temperatures getting up to 40 degrees, the big picture is frozen earth and frozen lake.
In summer the float planes take off and land here. In winter, people drive, skate, ski, and hike.

 A stunning blue sky, but I spun around 180 degrees and took a photo facing the other way... 

That's a lot of lake. You can't always tell where the lake begins, and there are patches at the edge where tussocks of grass are holding the snow up  between them quite a way above the ground. Often that suspended snow is strong enough to hold me up, but sometimes I punch through. Sometimes even the dogs punch through. Since we're so close to the lake, it's quite alarming when that happens.
I learn to fluctuate myself, a little: 
-Best time to hike is low tide: most sand, so the dogs can really run. Best part of the day to hike, before lunch: otherwise I'd get nothing done all morning with antsy dog(s). Ideal time and tide coincide only part of the time. There are some beaches, and other places (like the lake) where the tide is less critical, so we go there if there's a big morning high tide. 
-I shed some of my aversion to following in tracks. It's a false pride, since as a moderately civilized human all I ever do is some form of following in tracks, but there is something delicious about the illusion of going au randonee. Those tracks in the photo above are snow machine tracks, and they were helpful for finding ways on and off the lake as well as other ways down to it than we had used. Following vehicle trucks on the beach in sloppy gravel can be the difference between moderately impeded walking and frankly stumbling along, one step forward, three steps back.

As water drains over the pipe's ice-beard, as ice continues to cap the lake, I wonder what form my own springing forward will take, and where I am going next. I'm hoping I can create my own path or be guided to it, because otherwise most likely I'll be treading in my same coil of tracks that take me to a seemingly blue-sky place with storm clouds at my back. 
My mom says it's time for me to stop being a vane blown with all winds; to have a base from which I can journey forth. I'm grateful for the advice, and I'm grateful in a way my awkwardness can't register for the stability and rootedness of my parents' home. But even before I left that home, I was a stranger and a sojourner in the land; no one could ever place me. Not even I.

As I type that, Jesus' words about the wind whose sound you can hear, but from whence it came and whither it goeth you cannot discern, come into my mind. And so it keeps happening when I'm trying to work on a poem or essay right now. I'm working with an image or sound, and here comes something out of the Bible, or out of ancient Greek or Latin literature. I bat them aside, fearing they'll take me "into my head." But they persist. These are my anchors, even now, living here, in a state where I might be the sole Classicist. Perhaps, vane blown with all winds, I am instead the wind itself. Perhaps these texts and canons are my base to which I can return. Perhaps, even if no one else can discern it, I-the-wind must come to know from whence I come and whither I go.

New starts and directions always involve some destruction or composting of the previous. "In the beginning" at the beginning of Genesis should actually be read "In A beginning"--that's what the Hebrew says. This is now recognized as if a theological equivalent to quantum physics theories: there are many possible universes, many possible beginnings, many modalities and conditions, many lives simultaneous and serial.
This old root wad of a dead spruce tree has given life to several new trees.

Meanwhile, another beginning.