The Rituals of Spring

My mom loves everything old: old stoves, old kerosene lamps, old furniture, old books, and especially our old ram-shackled cabin in the bush. It is slanted, housing all types of critters, and you can see the lake through many of the wall slats because the cabin was built by my great grandfather. Sure, most people built their own cabins a hundred years ago but my great grandfather was a radiologist, more apt to reading scans than building plans so our cabin was built backwards. We always walk on the walls.

At arrival, Mom breathes in the bush and her body expands. All heaviness departs as she lifts up like a balloon. With light steps she floats down the path, silently touching everything—each brush tip of the spruce and fir trees, a curl of paper birch, the funny little fiddlehead coils just waking up beside the path, and the center of each bunchberry plant as if she is the magic that creates their little white flowers. It is quite the long process reuniting with the woods.

The lake finally opens before us and she throws off her shoes regardless of the temperature and slips down to the dock to say hello to the lake. There is no unpacking until this ritual is complete. The ritual that I am a part of each Spring from my place in her shadow. A charge flows from her as she engages with her first love and I am a magnet pulled along behind.

“The water is so much higher this Spring,” she muses to no one as she paints ebbs and flows on the surface of the calm water with her finger. She points out many differences that I can’t see.

Soon she’ll turn on the propane, light the old Survel fridges, and beat the winter dust from the heavy green curtains that act as doors for the bedrooms. As she completes her opening rituals, her fingers will slide along the carved names from her past like Sheila, Vicky, Joyce, and Jules still visible through the many layers of paint on the windowsills. She’ll pull out one of the hundred paperbacks squished along the narrow two by four shelf high in the wall as she latches the windows to the ceiling. But, this is just part of her ritual; there is no way she’ll read any of them. They are all sixty-year old westerns and sci-fi’s. I’m not sure if anyone has ever read them. I think their entire purpose is to add insulation under the roof.

I may be forgotten during most of her opening rituals but in the end she always returns to me. When the unpacking is done and the cabin is swept clean of winter, we snuggle into old handmade mission chairs under layers of quilts, drinking hot tea with honey, and fade into the belly of the raging fire Mom builds for us in the old drafty wood stove. Each time I wonder if I swallowed some of her lake energy because for a time I don’t quite feel like myself. The colours are more vibrant. The birds and the squirrels are so much louder. I can almost feel the breeze along the water even though it is far from where I sit. For this short moment I am blessed with a glimpse of how it feels to be her and I savour each second.

Spring Rituals at the Lake