Winter: Not Over 'till the Ice Cream Truck Sings

The groundhog doesn't determine when winter is over; the Ice Cream Truck does. When the sounds of the Ice Cream Truck become a regular fixture in the mixture of sounds I hear daily, I'm confident the days of coldness and snow are over. It's time for sun and growing and running and spending the majority of one's day outside, preferably in a swimsuit and with chronic bare-feet.

On the weekends, when I have halves of hours of free beautiful weather, I go outside and dig in the dirt, ridding the garden of weeds and myself of stress. I pull at the weeds so hard that my forearms are burning and throbbing for several days after, but it's a good pain. It's a feeling of satisfaction, of hard work, of throwing bodily caution away to make a dent in the ever expanding law of entropy (which states that everything moves in the direction of disorder when left alone; in this case, overgrowing weeds are the state of disorder and if left alone, would take over the yard, world, everything, if not attacked first).

I bring Benjamin out and let him wander about the yard or try to climb up the slide, or push a toy truck around the patio. He would forgo meals in order to spend more time outside.

Sometimes the rich, full scent of damp soil and torn-up plants causes me to pause, breathe in deeply several times, to feel the sun on me, to smell what it really feels like to be alive. The smell of earth is the smell of life to me. It's like a secret that is only whispered to me every so often, so rarely that I forget what it means sometimes, but to be reminded is to be refreshed.

Sometimes I'm quite confident I've been born in the wrong era or geographical location. I should have been born 80 years ago, on a farm or a ranch, so I could be near this smell all the time. I should marry a cowboy. When I was at school in Idaho, I loved the rural-ness of the place: the huge, open, vivid sky; the hay stacks one could crawl up on and stare at the stars; the rivers where all sorts of silly and satisfying activities took place (bridge jumping, canoeing, etc); the chilly nights on the sand dunes sitting around a bonfire (one always left smelling of burnt wood and of cold); and of course, the smell of earth. Urbaniers have forgotten (or perhaps we have never even learned) what to live is, to feel this way, to have this love affair with soil, earth, life. Who has a love affair with dirt? Only crazy people. I suppose I'm crazy then. Nuts, I tell ya.

Sometimes as I'm digging, the tinkling toy-piano melodies of the Ice Cream Truck sound faintly in the distance, become louder as they draw nearer to my street, and fade as they move on. The songs that blast softly from the slowly moving truck promise a certain mysterious excitement, a variety of things to choose from (and all of them good), beconing the children with come-one-come-all open arms, like the candy man, who mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.

"Benjamin! Benjamin!" I yell to him, trying to get him excited about the Ice Cream Man, but his interest has now moved to earthworms and how they squish in his fingers. The magic doesn't mean anything to him yet, but perhaps someday it will. Maybe in a few years he'll run frantically to me before I've even heard the melodies; his ears trained for this sound as a dog's are to a high-pitched whistle. To get children trained to respond to the melodies is the goal of the Ice Cream Man, but I don't mind. I hope that I'll have a couple dollars to give him, so he can run back, flag down the Ice Cream Man, stand on his bare tiptoes to see all the choices, all the possibilities. And then he'll sit on the porch, sun from above causing him to squint as he digs his toes into the dirt and licks his prize, with streams of blue, red, or chocolatey stickiness running down his chin. Content, alive.