The Aromas of Spring

Ah! Spring-cleaning, don’t you love it?

Now that the snow is finally gone and the green is sprouting it is time to clean up. It is amazing how much odorous stuff you find once the white cover is gone. Don’t you wish you had picked up all that doggy doo in its frozen state?  At this point you still have two options; wait for it to dry up to a manageable lump or grab some rubber boots, mask and a shovel and do the dirty deed pronto. The former means that you have to gingerly step around and inhale the aroma for at least a couple of weeks especially if it is a wet spring. The latter is the sensible way to go. I do have to confess that we learned our lesson the hard way some years ago and pick it up in its frozen state during the winter when it is easily disposed of.

We are not in the habit of bringing grub home from the fast food restaurants in town yet the yard seems filled with a number of sundry beverage and food containers bearing the names of the local Whitehorse eateries.  It always amazes me how these empty containers can travel during the winter season.

The heady aroma of fresh pine pitch is a sure sign of spring and the forerunner of the pollen blanket that dusts everything in a nice shade of green for a week or so.

The over production of cones that the trees produced last year is now on the ground. Dry as tinder and dangerously volatile.  They make a great fire starter but around our little patch of the world we rake them up as a precaution against an accidental ground fire getting out of hand.

The lakeshore is something else. The extreme water levels of last summer swept the beaches clean of debris dating back to the Klondike Gold Rush. The assorted planks and timbers are no longer usable for anything but firewood but many of them have the old square handmade nails in them. I salvage these for future use.

This spring I have recovered an old steamer hatch cover, several hand hewn oars and a rusty ½ gallon size can of something that I never identified as I did not open the can before taking it to the landfill.  It was full of a liquid and still sealed and could have contained anything from tomatoes or peaches to engine oil.  The size, it’s battered appearance and the metal suggested it might have been from the cargo of a long ago shipwreck and we spent many an hour fantasizing on its journey around the lake.

Spring is probably one of the shortest seasons for us above the 60th parallel. The perpetual daylight of June makes everything happen very quickly. Trees, like the Aspen go from bare poles to full foliage in less than a week. It is a great time to be alive in the Yukon.