PORTLAND, Maine — Right now, all over town, hundreds of cubic yards of dog poop are coming to light. Forgotten bicycles are getting remembered. Millions of cigarette butts, puffed in winter haste, are clogging sidewalk gutters.
No doubt about it — it’s springtime in Portland.
In other parts of Maine, people look for crocuses and snowdrops in the spring. They listen for twittering robins and browse their seed catalogs. They go fishing.
In Portland, we gauge spring in a different way. We watch the dirty snowbanks melt and discover what they’ve been hiding all winter. It’s not pretty but that’s how spring rolls around here.
There’s the inexplicable, single sneaker, the crushed bike helmet, the dirty underwear. They sit along side the used diaper, the leftover campaign sign and the flattened beer can.
It’s all garbage. That’s true. But the detritus is a sign of life, too.
The half-buried mattress, sticking out of the snowbank, means someone moved up, or moved out. Maybe they got a better bed. Or, maybe, they got priced out of their apartment. There’s no way to know but that nasty box spring is proof they were here.
You don’t have to look far to find a used hypodermic needle on the sidewalk. Even more common are the orange, plastic safety tips that go over the sharp bit. They litter parts of Bayside in the hundreds.
It’s a gruesome detail, a reminder of the addictions our neighbors struggle with every day. The garbage they leave behind shouts their existence to us. It demands we notice them.
Right now, down in Parkside, the handle from a broken snow shovel is laying there with a story to tell. The details are unknown but you can imagine. It’s possible that it gave out during one of those late March storms. That’s when we got that heartbreaking, heavy snow.
That spent handle embodies humanity’s never-ending struggle against nature. The snow falls. We clear it. Then, the cycle repeats. We never win. The struggle goes on until the shovel snaps or spring comes.
In Portland, the season of hope doesn’t come pretty but it arrives, anyway. Spring isn’t all birdsong and buzzing bees around here. There’s hope and humanity in that dirty snowbank.
