Tuesday, March 19, 2024 was the Vernal Equinox. The sun was directly over the earth’s equator and husbands throughout the world saw their sublime winter days replaced by wives who feel compelled to build nests, or more correctly, to exhort their husbands to help do so. Peg does not care that we live in the country and no one can even see our yard from the nearest road. When spring arrives, my reverie ends. Watching sports on TV fades in the glow of longer days that demand immediate attention to countless tasks that must be attended to, “Right Now!” Never mind that not one of these matters mattered until the ponds stopped freezing over.
The inexhaustible energy of a wife in springtime is exhausting. What is there in the female biology that cannot accept that Mother Nature provides her own rejuvenation of beauty such as dandelions and blooming thistle. Woman-made improvements to nature’s burgeoning bounty of wild growing plants, that Peg calls weeds, must be addressed with rakes, hoes, chemicals and sweat, mine.
It is not that I wish to ignore home maintenance. I agree that grass should be mowed occasionally. However, where is the sin in appreciating what comes from nature? Do we need numerous areas for flowers and vegetables that are readily available from Walmart? Why did we save for retirement if we are not going to retire? And, what about the welfare of all the little critters we are disrupting and worse with god-knows what concoctions that we spray and spread? I ask you, Gentle Reader, well, at least those of you who are husbands, what is wrong with living with nature? Live and let live sounds good to me.
Another thing that comes with spring is the plethora of Nature’s creations that apparently want to live in proximity with us and which Peg cannot abide. About once each day I am startled by, “Jim!” I know from the tone and decibel level that some unlucky snake, mouse, squirrel, scorpion, spider or bird has been doing its spring things too close to ours and my role is to ruin its day. Never mind that all these creatures want is to eat and procreate on their own terms without our interference, they must be dispatched, by me of course.
There is hope for Peg’s yearly compulsion to control the natural world with my labor. Before long the Summer Solstice will arrive and the moist earth and temperate weather will gradually metamorphosize into sunbaked clay and near drought. Then maybe Peg’s condition will cure itself until she hears the siren of autumn’s equinox and the chores of preparing for winter.
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