Mud Season

I write this as rain taps the skylights in my parent's house in North Vancouver, a place I have called home in some sense since I was four years old. It's grounding to have this place to come back to, however temporarily, for a dose of the familiar. Amazing to pull into a paved driveway after leaving the thick stew of the mud-rutted drive in front of my house: mud season has officially begun. The snow still stubbornly holds like an icy shield over the yard and in the thick of the trees, but the recent stretch of warmer temperature is working to find the edge of grass.

Tonight the house is vacant: parents and one sister away, the other sister out for the night, and I realize that it has been a very long time since I have spent time in the open spaces of this home on my own. It's quiet but for the rain. The rain is a frequent sound here, but the quiet feels new in a way, like something forgotten and then found almost by accident. I remember how much I used to love the quiet time here, just me and the rain. Often growing up and still even now a television is on somewhere, one of my sisters, or even playing to an empty room, the low-frequency voice of some reality TV dialogue stretching into the corners of every room. Most of my adult life has been spent living TV-less, and there is not an ounce of me that feels regret or like I have missed out on anything of significance. If anything I have read more, thought more, written more, painted more, talked more to people who I care about and who care about me.

It has been a very positive week for me personally, professionally, in my thinking patterns, and I think that perhaps I always experience some sort of a lull in positive temperament as the last threads of winter lift their fingers from the land. According to my mother I was always "more difficult to manage" during the month of February, and to be honest I was quite difficult to manage all year long while I was growing up, so perhaps "impossible" to manage is more of an appropriate term for my mood at the end of winter. I feel that in some ways I was also completely overwhelmed by the stresses of life as a young person, of the over-stimulation of growing up in a city, as this place became busier over the years we lived here.

What started out as a vacant forested lot beside my childhood home was completely bulldozed and then built up into gigantic homes and manicured landscapes when I was becoming an adolescent, just when an escape into the woods would have possibly calmed my spirited temper and mind.

But at least I am coming back to this now, to my need to escape to the wilds of somewhere in order to feel a sense of order and sanity in my life.

It was a rough drive down after school today, as the highway between Gold Bridge and Lillooet is in a serious state of disrepair, minefields of cavernous pot holes throwing punches at my poor vehicle, splashing muddy water onto my windshield. No way to avoid them without driving off the road. Just take it slow and easy and grit your teeth at times. Remind yourself it's just a vehicle after all.

I am here now for the night, en route to Saskatchewan, and it is spring break for the next ten days. Cameron and I had such a good time together in my locale, and now I am headed over to check out the land he grew up on, to walk in the snow, to watch the sky turn pink and pale with prairie sunset. Certainly not the tropical surf vacation that has been my usual fare over spring break, but it will definitely be different, somewhere completely new to tour with a local, and this is always exciting to me.