Spring, late

It's April, and the snow isn't finished with us, whatever the calendar says. People here call every April snow the last one, and say it with total confidence, sometimes four times in a spring. It comes down wet and heavy one evening, bends the new shoots in my mother's flower beds flat, and is gone from the sidewalks by the next afternoon, leaving the shoots standing up again looking offended.

Spring in Duluth isn't a season so much as an argument. The lake holds the cold long after everywhere inland has given up on it, so you can drive twenty minutes over the hill and find it twenty degrees warmer and people in shorts, and drive back down into fog and a wind off the ice. The ice is mostly gone from the harbor now. The first boats came in weeks ago. The lilacs are a rumor.

My mother has begun her garden, which in April means paper. She has seed catalogs on every flat surface in the kitchen and a plan of the backyard drawn on graph paper, with the beans and the peas and the tomatoes in different colored pencil, and an eraser worn to a stub. The spare room, which once had a stain shaped like Lake Superior and then had me, now has tomato seedlings in egg cartons on the windowsill under a lamp, and she checks them the way other people check the news. Everyone she knows has told her not to plant anything outside before Memorial Day. She will plant some of it before Memorial Day. She does every year, and every year a few things die and the rest come up anyway, and she says that's the point.

People are playing the game now. That's all I'm going to say about it here.

It's light until after eight. I walked down to the lake after dinner one evening this week and stood there with my hands in my pockets until it got dark, which took a long, generous time.