Subtle signs of spring — or maybe, more accurately, late winter — have finally begun appearing in my corner of the world. The streets have shrugged off their coats of snow and ice to reveal black pavement again. Thin, malevolent-looking icicles grow off the eaves of roofs where snow alternately thaws then freezes daily. I walk, and my weight cracks fissures in the sheets of ice resting atop trapped layers of water.
For a long time I considered fall my favorite season, until last year, when I realized spring had usurped it. (I don’t know if most people think about their favorite seasons, foods, or colors this much, or if I do only because my job as an ESL teacher requires me to express these preferences to students in slow, well-articulated syllables before asking for theirs.) I do still love fall. The foliage is beautiful, sweater weather is cozy, apples and cinnamon and candles, etc.
But my perception changed last year when I noticed how deeply spring’s arrival affected me. The relief and release it triggered in both my body and soul was incomparable to anything fall has to offer. I wasn’t simply happy to see spring arrive; I needed it. I’d been craving it without realizing it. While the earth, plants, and fauna began stirring again, some interior part of me likewise reawakened. A very vital part of myself. Literally. Vital, as in vitality. The part of myself that holds keys to my enthusiasms and passions and general senses of competence and optimism. Spending time in warmth and sunshine felt as urgent and precious as the first gulp of air after breaking above water.
During late winter, I feel a general desire to turn away from anything too difficult and burrow into soft pillows and blankets. I experience a drop off of interest toward writing and, really, anything not guaranteed to be immediately pleasurable. Given these feelings, I suspect myself of developing seasonal affective disorder annually in February and March. Reflection on my mood and energy levels this year in combination with memories from past winters makes the assessment quite sound to me. I felt this way most acutely two years ago as I was finishing my last semester of college. I attributed the low energy to academic burnout, which I still believe it was, but now in hindsight I think seasonal affective disorder likely had a hand to play too. Because reading and writing are two activities I usually find energizing and fulfilling, this blockage can make me feel sad, even lost.
As I write this now, I’m sitting in front of a light therapy box in hopes I can mitigate these feelings until spring’s true arrival alleviates them wholly. Acquiring self-knowledge of this kind is supposed to gift you with self-acceptance and a better capacity for self-management, and I guess it has, but I struggle to comprehend the line where self-knowledge seems to turn into self-fulfilling prophecy. Or in other words: If I repeat the story of my seasonal lethargy to myself enough, am I helping to reinforce it?
But that’s tangential. This is all to say: I take a deep interest in spring, its arrival, and its restorations of abundance and activity to both the natural world and my spirit.
The transition between winter and spring also draws me back to Marianne Robinson’s first novel Housekeeping. I’ve read it twice before: once in college, in a class titled Literature and the Mystical Experience, and once last spring, when my instincts drew me back to it for all the same reasons I feel drawn toward it now.
Mostly it’s a matter of ice. Ice, even for all its hazards, is perhaps a good thing. Ice is a sign of temperatures flirting with thirty-two. Ice in abundance is an indication that winter is out the door. Snow thaws under bright sunshine on the first days when temperatures rise above freezing, and then leaves ice behind where snowmelt finds no avenue for drainage. The thaw can’t happen all at once; it has to happen gradually, in this layered process, and ice is the witness to that process. Icicles are a quintessential emblem of winter, and yet they’re never so long as when spring is around the corner.
Robinson gifts us with gorgeous images of ice in the novel: its forming, breaking, melting. Two stand out to me. They’d remained lodged in my imaginative memory even before this re-read. Both images center on the lake beside the town of Fingerbone, Idaho, where the novel takes place. The lake is important both to the town, because its size dominates the landscape, and to our narrator, Ruthie, because it took the lives of both her grandfather and mother.
The whole novel is rendered in Ruthie’s thoughtful voice, including incidents of family history from before her birth, which she’s taken great care to imagine for herself. In the early pages of the novel, she paints the scene of her grandfather’s demise when the passenger train he conducted slid off a bridge and into the frigid lake. Volunteer divers searched for the submerged train, but...
When the sun rose, clouds soaked up the light like a stain. It became colder. The sun rose higher, and the sky grew bright as tin. The surface of the lake was very still. As the boys’ feet struck the water, there was a slight sound of rupture. Fragments of transparent ice wobbled on the waves they made and, when the water was calm again, knitted themselves up like bits of a reflection [ . . .] the water was becoming dull and opaque, like cooling wax. Shivers flew when a swimmer surfaced, and the membrane of ice that formed where the ice was torn looked new, glassy, and black. All the swimmers came in. By evening the lake there had sealed itself over.
In freezing, the lake swallows the unrecovered train and passengers. This piece of lore settles in Ruthie’s mind and receives frequent attention throughout the novel. I think I’m drawn to this image of the lake’s sudden freezing for the simple wild drama of it: not only the sublime moment of transition, but also the shock of seeing human calamity trumped by natural forces.
The second striking image of ice occurs a few chapters later, in one of Ruthie’s direct experiences. Several days of late winter rain prompt a flood in the town of Fingerbone:
The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed. The ice would still be thick, but it would be the color of paraffin, with big white bubbles under it. In normal weather there would have been perhaps an inch of water on top of it in shallow places. Under the all the weight of the flood water it sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones. The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.
The loud groans of the lake continue for several days as houses remain submerged, and the flood ends only when “suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water slid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud.” It’s again a hugely dramatic natural moment, almost orchestral in its volume and fury. I’ve sometimes thought of it while walking across frozen sidewalks and watching the brittle ice beneath my boots break and comingle with the water below and beside it. A much smaller rupture, but beautiful and wondrous still.
A new line of thought occurred to me with this re-reading. I wonder if there’s something in the ambivalence of spring — its vacillation between cold and warmth — that reflects the girls’ vulnerability. Ruthie and her younger sister Lucille are taken from Seattle to Fingerbone by their mother, who leaves them on their grandmother’s porch before driving into the lake. (This, too, happens early in the novel, setting the stage for the events that follow). After their mother’s suicide, they’re cared for first by their grandmother, then by their great aunts, and finally by their mother’s sister, Sylvie, whose arrival signals hope for both a more stable household and insight into their mother’s character.
The girls are unsure of whether Sylvie will truly stay in Fingerbone. They worry over it during the first night after her arrival, and their worries continue when Sylvie ventures for a walk alone in the morning. Ruthie notes, “It had been a cold night that froze the slush and hardened the heaps of dirty, desiccated snow by the sides of the road.” The girls follow Sylvie, concerned she’s secretly leaving town. They follow her into the train station on the pretense of reminding her she’d forgotten her bags, but are reassured when Sylvie tells them she’d simply come into the station to get warm. They go together to the five and ten store, where the girls help Sylvie choose a scarf and gloves to buy, dismissing their concerns of her desertion. They go home together:
When we came back into the street the sun was shining warmly. When we came to the end of the sidewalk, there was no way for Sylvie to walk without now and then stepping over her shoes in water of one sort or another. This difficulty seemed to absorb her but not to disturb her.
The transition from cold to warmth, from freeze to melt, is as abrupt as the girls’ delivery from worry into assurance. And like this seasonal liminal space, the girls are also in limbo. Their future is also varied and volatile. Sylvie’s arrival brings about a new direction to that future — a kind of thaw in the girls’ sense of their mother, arousing memories and raising questions. Her presence draws up what’s been lost in the lake.
It’s difficult to talk about spring without dipping into clichés. To be fair, it’s difficult to talk about anything so ancient without touching a cliché — the seasonal cycles are so impactful on human life, they lend themselves to heavy metaphorical use.
Housekeeping is one of those rare narratives that can serve beautifully jeweled observations of philosophical and theological importance while neither slowing down nor feeling forced. I love it for the uniqueness of the place I feel it must have been conjured from and its traces of that place’s thoughtfulness and insight. Or as Anatole Broyard wrote in a review for the New York Times, “It’s as if, in writing it, [Robinson] broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration.” It’s perfect for the languorous, drowsing mood I find myself in at the end of winter.
I looked forward to writing about it for the opportunity to make more sense of it. I recalled re-reading it last year and moving through passages while admiring their beauty but remaining undeniably ignorant to their full depths. I feel I’ve made some progress here, though the novel at large still mesmerizes me. Its pieces fit too snugly together to submit to easy dismantling.
I won’t be surprised if I find myself reaching for Housekeeping again next March, when the end of another long Hokkaido winter invites me back to Fingerbone. And I’m sure I’ll gain more insight then. As Ruthie observes, meditating on the disparate elements of her world around her: What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope you’ve found some part of it interesting or recognizable. If you have thoughts you’d like to share, I’d love to read them in a comment.
This fifth essay marks the end of my first reading cycle: one new release, one book from an author of a diverse background, one book I feel I “should” read, one recommendation, and one re-read. My next essay will again focus on a recent release: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Thank you again, and stay well.