Sprung

Amy left Wednesday night. She'd been here for a week, and that was a week full of loveliness. I don't know if there is a phrase I can turn to accurately capture how nice it was to have a girlfriend in town. When I came home from work, Amy was there watching What Not to Wear, and I would sit next to her and begin very important discussions like how we could get Clinton to make out with us if ever the situation presented itself to us. Do you know how nice that is? Do you know how nice it is to see someone else have to fan themselves off after Clinton has said something witty about Crocs or Mom Jeans or Shoulder Pads? It's just not as fun when you have to do that by yourself.

What Not to Wear wasn't the only thing that graced the television when Amy was in town. There was one night when we--tired, lazy--decided to pour wine and flick through the channels. We landed on an episode of The Dog Whisperer. And when that episode was over another was on. So we watched that. And we watched the next one, too. By the end we felt one with the animal kingdom. We were walking around the apartment (and, days later, around Maine and Massachusetts) hissing tsssst! at anyone or anything that looked at us wrong.

Of course, watching television wasn't all we did. We toured extensively. This was just the right time for Amy to visit. Maine is suddenly leaning toward lovely again. Everything is melted. It is warm. People are smiling. The number of curse words I utter each day have decreased substantially. Things are looking up all over the state, and so we took advantage of it. We went to Freeport, to Popham Beach, to Bath, to Portland. We even hopped The Downeaster and went to Boston for the day last weekend. We drank cosmos and margaritas. We drank wine. We mixed orange vodka with pomegranate pop and raspberry-lime ginger-ale and Loganberry (official name: The Cowboy Daddy). We posed, too. We posed by lighthouses and moose and historical statues and bronze ducks. We posed by Indians and boots. We posed in the rain, in the wind, in the sun. We hammed it up all over New England.

The whole trip felt just like spring should: kicky, free, happy. It felt the exact opposite of the last few months, which have been gloomy, painful, and sour.

When we were at lunch one afternoon, Amy and I overheard a bunch of gossipy old ladies tut-tutting over how awful, how wretched, how foul this winter had been. Amy spooned more soup into her mouth and raised her eyebrows. "Was it really that bad?" she asked me. What she wanted to know was this: was it as bad as Buffalo Winter?

Well, it wasn't. There weren't days when I couldn't see a foot out the window to the street beyond. There weren't days when I was convinced I had somehow woken up in some wintry ring of hell. But there was snow. And there was always drama. The weathermen would get on the TV and prepare us, warn us, caution us, and everyone would get worked up for what turned out to be nothing. And when it did snow--really snow--it came in big, consistent gobs. It would go away in a day or two, then it would come back again. It was a constant here-gone-here-gone-here-gone that drove me crazy. And living on a narrow road that arcs over a surprising hill in a quiet section of town is different than living on a well-traveled country road during the winter months. My road here was hell, there was no snow removal, the banks towered high and then spilled over into the road, making it even narrower, even harder to navigate. It was demoralizing. I longed for a driveway of my own, for the comforting rumble of the snowplows making their passes at the country road, for space for the snow to move, to fall, to not build toward the sky, blotting it out, making the dark winter sky even gloomier.

But all that is over for now. Now nothing matters. The sun is out, the breeze is blowing in the salty smell of ocean, and I had a good week that reminded me of what's important in life. And no matter how many times this semester I thought What the hell is happening? or Kill me now! or Are you for real? I know that it's all going to be okay now. I'm very close to a summer spent touring to Mexico, Canada, Buffalo, and Michigan. Just a few more weeks. Just a few, few more weeks.

And until then, here are pictures from Amy's visit and our mini-New England vacation.


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