More about Spring

Lots of media assumes that where I live is the default climactic position. We have four seasons, they occur in a predictable order and they include all the classic benchmarks of a season: snow in winter, colored leaves in autumn, hot sunny days in summer and rain in spring.

All the weather cliches apply here too - March does come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, January is the coldest month of the year and April showers really do bring May flowers to name the first three that come to mind.

What people who don't live in a classic eastern climate don't anticipate and don't often see are all the things that go with living in a stereotypical climate.

It's April. The snow dump is a brown mound of melting ice. In the sugar bush, the last of the maple syrup is being boiled and the buckets are starting to come off the trees, buds are clearly visible and the pussy willows will soon be past it. The streets are wet about half the time, wind blows like crazy and it rains a fair bit. All of that is fairly predictable but the street sweepers are not.

One thing an urban Ottawa resident needs to keep on their nightstand at this time of year is a set of earplugs. This is because you can never tell when it will happen and it will never be the same type of mechanism twice but you can count on this; it will happen and it will be deafening and repetitive almost to the point of physical pain. This is the time of year when the street sweepers clean up the accumulated grit of winter and that grit is stubborn and substantial.

Everyone I know who lives in a climate that does not get snow understands the lovelier, more romantic aspects of the stuff but none of them realize that snow is still frozen rain and it mixes with the kind of dust and dirt that you'd find on any city street. Under that lovely mantle of white is a cake of dirt and salt that will melt some and then harden to a crust in April - and then the city will send out the cleaning equipment and your late nights or early mornings will be shaped around just how dirty your neighborhood got while the winter took its toll and how zealous the street cleaners are in their job of making it clean again.

In order to sweep a rind of salt and dirt from a city street, you need something more aggressive than your average street sweeper - there are trucks with hoses, machines with hard and heavy metal brushes and scraping apparatus.

The one factor they have in common is their volume and their unpredictability. This morning at 7:00 the first of the sweepers went by my back lane. Apparently it was a difficult task as they went over and over the job. The noise is what you'd expect - scrape metal over pavement as hard as you can for half an hour and you get the idea. Last week it was a truck with a power washing hose going over and over the boulevards. There will probably be another machine later, it will sound like a giant vacume cleaner which is more or less what it is.

Like the snowplows, I realize these machines are necessary and I know they will fit us in wherever time permits. I also know that they do not wish to hold up traffic so, like the rest of the city, I get a good set of earplugs and resign myself to it. The seasons are changing and people's peaceful mornings are not as important as the flow of traffic. Really.

But I wish they were.