The Last Day of Winter

On the last day of winter, the seekers went foraging in the blueberry field, looking for signs of melt or mud, for patches of brown earth or lone, stray, disheveled blades of grass to contrast with the vast veneer of snow and the lingering layers of endless white. The sun was out, but only meekly so, hiding behind clouds and peeping through the grey streaks for brief intervals, hesitatingly here and there. It was one of those weird, restless days when people who previously (all winter long) had been ready to snap, finally snap, or snap yet again, or otherwise relapse into eccentric behaviors. Two of the seekers were at first chatting discursively about their hunger pangs, their difficulty breathing, their unreliable footwear, the frigid discomfort of appendages,  having left sturdier coats, hats and gloves at home; they found themselves speculating about whether woods were more haunted in warm weather than during the cold season, whether ghosts hibernated, whether spirits traveled south for a time like everyone else in New England. The other two wayfarers were lost, transfixed, caught up in a rambling conversation about the heartier peoples of earlier times who dealt with winter without complaint, those hellions in Russia and Mongolia, who lived with the elements, who were forced to hunt and fish and built shelters or who hibernated underground for months at a time - without complaint. Those sturdier types, they asked for so little, expected little, begrudged no one, resented no one, were grateful for their portion, not like people these days, the pathetic whiners of modernia, those ultra-sensitive hyper-condriacs, who can't be outside in any kind of wind chill,  can't sleep exposed to the elements, can't go without their allergy pills, can't deal with any glitch in their schedule. Give me a little bit of that old spirit: to accept what life throws at you without expectation or lament...It's really quite tragic, when you consider that we can't go back to that mindset, it's not a matter of people not being able to face winter.......it's more the mindset that's we've lost touch with...because those tribes, those peoples lived within narrow horizons - their home was their world - they had nothing to compare it to really - nowhere that they'd rather be...