Vividly, disturbingly, Tom Robbins puts it best:

That year, spring came to the Puget Sound country as it frequently does, like a bride’s maid climbing a greased pole. After a gradual, precarious ascent, spring, in a triumph of frills and blooms and body heat, would seem to have finally arrived, only to suddenly slide down into the mud again, leaving the winter’s wet flag flapping stiffly and singularly at the top of the seasonal staff. Then, girlish bosom heaving, spring would shinny slowly back up the pole.

From Still Life with Woodpecker.

11 replies on “Re: Re: SPRING”

  2. it’s not really the rain it is the constant slurpy ground. The water is there. If your driveway is separate bricks it puddles up through them. There are tire tracks 4 inches deep in the lawn, a brown “scar” of saturated mud, a vivid track print, that has stayed for months and that get shiningly wet with each fresh rain. but the water never drains out of the ground. it’s like living in a sailboat that’s stuck in the tidal gooey mudflats nine months out of the year.

    so when outlanders make fun of the rain, I say no, it’s not the rain. it’s the water logged ground. kid’s can’t play on it you can’t have a picnic on it to see all those blossoms you would need three layers of goretex just to sit on it.

    4……3…..2……1 (“if you can’t say something false and nice about every aspect of our area, esp. about weather conditions, why don’t you move somewhere else blah blah blah”)

  4. Still Life contains some great descriptions of Seattle, including an entire chapter that devotes itself to a fantasia of blackberries allowed to grow from roof to roof across the entire city. Tom Robbins is quirky, perhaps an acquired taste, but a great local writer.

    Thanks for sharing that this morning.

  6. When I first read Robbins it was Another Roadside Attraction and I was floored by his spot-on description of the PNW. I’ve yet to find writing that comes anywhere close on our pretty corner of the world.

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