Back home in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, around this time of year, people would accelerate the snow melting process in their front yards by waiting for a warm sunny spring day and then shoveling the snow onto the street in front of their homes, where it would melt and run down into the storm drains.

This was completely illegal. See, when you do this, it makes the pavement wet, and if the notoriously fickle Prince Edward Island weather takes a turn for the colder and dips below zero before it dries out, you have just turned the street in front of your house into a surprise skating rink by covering it in a thin layer of that evil substance, black ice.

So doing it was something of a gamble and smart house owners would make sure to do it in the early afternoon to make sure that the snow would have the longest time to melt and run down the drain and the pavement would have a good long time to dry out before it got dark.

Still, doing it was always a bit of a risk. Anyone caught doing it could end up in trouble with the city cops, not to mention any snow plow driver or city worker who happened by and giving an irresponsible citizen an earful.

But people did it any way. And I can see why, because my family did not usually do it and so we would end up being the only house on our street that still had snow in the front yard when all the rest were bare.

Picture that. It certainly made our place stick out. Looking back at it now, it all seems a little magical. Like our home was its own little magical land and had its own weather.

What brought this practice to mind was both the coming spring outside my window and the spring that is happening within my soul. I feel like my soul has be buried under ice and snow for a very long time and only now can I claim that spring is truly coming and I will burst into boisterously blooming life once more.

But first, I have a lot of snow to shovel on to that warm pavement. Emotions that have been frozen in place for decades need to be dug out and melted before they can run down the drain and be gone.

So that is what I am doing with the darker angst postings now. Just shoveling out my back yard to hasten the coming of spring.

I have been thinking a lot about closeness lately, especially after last Friday’s post. I have been thinking in particular about my family and trying to figure out how close we were.

It is hard to know, because I do not have a baseline of closeness to compare it to. It certainly seems that we all did our own thing much of the time. When I was very young, before school, we did some things as a family, especially in the summer. But as I got older and our relationship with my father got worse and worse, the family just kind of gave up on that.

We all had our own lives. In many ways, it was more like having roommates than having a family. We still got together for dinner every night, and maybe that is why I have such a strong desire to go back to that in my life today. It was the only time when we were all together as a family.

So despite being ground zero for my father’s angry tirades, it still was quality family time most of the time.

But that is not closeness, not really. It’s conviviality, perhaps, but you can get that from close friends. There is supposed to be something deeper than that with family. Something that makes blood thicker than water. Some kind of unbreakable bond of trust and love and support that transcends all the petty crap of life and last a lifetime.

Maybe that is just the hopeless idealism of a child raised by sitcom families. But I have seen how close some families are, and as a little boy left out in the cold, I could only look in from the outside at their warmth and togetherness, and wish I could go inside and experience it myself.

A lot of this coldness was my father’s fault. His anger was the primary disease on our family unit. He always wanted us to be a sitcom kind of family, but he never understood that his volatility, anger, and impatience was what made that impossible. You cannot have the true family closeness you desire when you have made everybody afraid of you.

Fear and love are simply incompatible.

So the fact that we all felt like we had to walk on eggshells around him certainly didn’t help. That is the sort of thing that makes it nearly impossible to relax enough to let your hair down and bond with people.

In theory, shared adversity brings people together, but in our case, it drove us apart.

But I don’t think it is all my father’s fault. My mother is a very sweet and kind woman, but there is also a certain chill to her as well. She is a highly intellectual person, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that all her kids turned out that way too. We are all eggheads of various species of egg.

Also, just be being as sensitive as she was, she too kept us on eggshells a bit because we didn’t want to upset her. This was nowhere near as dire a thing as trying (in vain) to keep my father happy, but I think we all kept negative things away from her for fear of hurting her.

So we could not exactly come to her to talk about bad things happening in our lives. It would only upset her. From my current point of view, I can see that while it might of upset her, she probably would have been quite happy to be a part of our lives.

At least that is how I would feel if I was her, and I am a lot like her in many many ways.

Well, that is my shovelful of snow for today, folks. Forecast calls for more tomorrow.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!