Mud Season

It's mud season, here in Maine. This is when the intensity of the winter continues to haunt us. The snow takes its time to melt, and it leaves wet, sludgy pools in its wake. The skies are gray and blah . . . blah, blah, blah. 

My first mud season in Maine was also the first of my depressive episodes. Serious stuff. Days of seething irritation and just-below-the-surface rage--at myself, at everyone and everything around me. I had no clue what was happening. I just thought this place was HORRIBLE. I drove to school (where I taught children with serious behavior disorders), muttering about everything being awful. I dragged myself through the day, and then drove home muttering about everything being awful. I went to my bedroom, turned on a TV, and then spent the rest of the evening lying on my bed with glazed eyes and not really seeing or hearing what was on the TV. I ignored the concerned looks and questions from my roommate (and often got pissed that she even bothered to talk to me, because . . . why? Why would anyone want to talk to me?). I wondered how I got to this place, literally and figuratively. And, I tried to stay as numb as possible, because when I let myself feel, it felt dismal. See the color of that mud in that picture to the right? That was my brain, that was my mood. Allie Bosh's blog Hyberbole and a Half: Adventures in Depression is a brilliant animated story of this booger of a disorder. I find some form of expression, whether written or visual or musical or physical, is the best way to slog through depression. But, I'm a fortunate one because using creative expression, some therapy, and a little bit of medical help, I can break through the gray. Not everyone is so lucky.

Mud Season

This is the time when winter's layers
begin to melt, slowly bringing to view
what's underneath, the detritus 
from these past months, an icy cement
of old snow, trash, decayed leaves and grass, and mud 
in it's most troublesome form.

This mud is dark and thick and 
it's everwhere,
everywhere I step, everywhere I look. It's on
my shoes and my dogs' paws. It tracks
into the floors of my house,
where I mop and mop and can never
get rid of it, this mix of the external 
and the internal. In future months
it will nourish the vegetables that sustain
us, it will support the flowers that bloom the new 
season, and the grass that will carpet 
on top of it, it will dry under a crisp sun, and become
but dust, easily swept away. 

But that is months from now. Today, tomorrow,
the weeks ahead, it will only worsen, 
as these things tend to do.
I will see this landscape progressively darken
with winter's leaving, the muddy places revealing 
more of themselves, making it impossible 
to ignore them, forcing me to see

that sometimes what gives us life
has it's ugliness, at least for a bit,
until time and effort and the illuminating light
and heat of a sun can render those remnants
just a light dust, one easily swept away.