The First Sign of Blooming Is Mud Season’s Heroically Ugly Thaw
I find something heroic about mud season, the hard-to-love transition between winter and spring. Winter is a time of preserving warmth, of burrowing in, of getting by, of watching things sleep and die. Its stark, bare beauty demands respect. Spring is more obvious and showy, cute baby ducks and exuberant flowers. Other than a bit of resentment over its self-absorbed success, what is there not to love about spring? Mud season is harder to love. It is neither reserved and respectable, nor fresh-faced and optimistic. Mud season is truths that are hard to look at, awkward first steps, ugly crying, family secrets that come out in court and horrible first dates.
Mud season is black-tipped piles of icy slush where first snowfall was gentle, pillowy, softness, bubble wrap and white wash. Even trailer parks and abandoned cars take on a crisp nobility under fresh snow. Burly plows muscle the snow into piles, mixing in unnoticed touches of gravel, road salt and dead grass scooped up by accident. By mud season, the ground is bare in the sun and on the flats, but the piles remain along the roadways, in parking lots and in the shade, the tail ends of sucked out popsicles. As the snow melts away, the ratio of snow to crap in the remaining piles shifts, concentrating the dregs. The piles deflate like pillows slept on, balled up and punched down one too many nights in a row.
Mud season is honest and raw. Winter wasn’t as pristine as it pretended to be and spring is not all tulips and yellow chicks. Mud season is the necessary and cathartic echoes of hateful words, remnants of hard conversations, unfinished and tucked away like land mines ready to go off when you stumble on them. Mud season brings to light long forgotten things, piles of poop and discarded cigarette butts appearing by the porch along with a hammer given up for lost. Mud season’s persistent investigative journalism dumps winter’s secrets to the tabloids, along with some unflatteringly graphic photos. Mud season exposes winter’s dead bodies before they can get covered up with spring’s obliviously, cheerful, flowered wallpaper.
Mud season is waking up cranky. The skittish hibernators begin to emerge, treating the world outside their den with a strange mix of suspicion and restrained hunger. Willing to wake up gradually and hoping to find some berries or coffee, they are instead roused suddenly and finding no ready sustenance wander into town where they get hit by a car or devour a neighbor. Some winters are longer than others.
Mud season is notoriously indecisive, a critical character flaw. It cannot be trusted. In the morning, it delivers a foot of fluffy white powder and then in the afternoon, it sends enough rain to set the snow into ice. People bring their skis hoping for one last run, only to find themselves slipping too fast down disappointingly crystallized runs, slicing their palms on the hard ground when they fall. You can’t make mud season happy. You can bring microspikes, snowshoes, cross-country skis, hip-high wading boots and none of them will be right.
Mud season puts its foot in its mouth. It tries when it should not. A few warm days coax blossoms out on trees only to have them mowed down in their prime by an arctic blast. The aborted attempts just cause more problems than they are worth, embarrassing everyone, leaving damage in their wake.
Still, mud season refuses to give up, refuses to learn the tempting lesson that there is no point in even trying. For all its flaws, there is something fundamentally heroic about mud season. How else would we ever get from quiet, restrained death to grandstanding rebirth without awkward, inadvisable, first steps? After months of cold, understated carnage, the first sign of the blooming to come is a brutally honest assessment, an ugly, undignified thaw.
