Apruary?

I recall April on Matinicus as a mixed bag weather and workwise. There would be sweet days in the yard, underrunning rope or patching traps with tunes playing and birds singing. There would be rainy windy days to stay inside and avoid paperwork.

My April on Matinicus this year- which I worked so hard to be ready for- has been an unmixed bag of rotten weather; days spent watching sleet bounce off my deck or watching it rain sideways. Today featured a low of 32 and a high of 34 with 40-something mile an hour winds all day long. This is not what I pounded my way through months of office work to earn. I have not even begun boat preparation work, which I'm usually done with by now.

I spent Sunday neurotically cutting wood which I did not anticipate that I would be unneurotically baling into the stove the very next day. I thought I was being obsessive in sawing and splitting up the chunks which it turns out are half gone already.

I feel as though the entire calendar has slid a month to the henceforthward. Cold wet springs last til about the first week in July, and late summer goes to Halloween. I want my April back.

I also guess I should not read google news. There were several articles about the slowdown in the big-ocean circulation that keeps Ireland from looking like Northern Labrador and keeps the cold water churning  and upwelling nutrients southwest into the the Gulf of Maine. This slowdown could, according to scientists, deprive Western Europe of warm ocean currents, make Africa drier and hotter and create harsher winters here in North America. Thus is created the monster I am calling Apruary.

Apruary is bad. My crocuses were pressed not in a poetry book, but in a layer of ice outside my door. All my spring work is now late. Staring out the window makes no difference. Staring out any other other window is equally fruitless. It is 360 degrees of wind, rain and cold foulness.

Is this a good month to discover my old oil fired boiler is now an oil chugging smoke machine? Well, yes it is. When I got up, as much as I felt stingy about using heating oil, I saw the gale bent trees and the 32 degree temperature and figured my son and his buddy should have a habitable environment and that the old boiler should be fired up every once in a while.

There was initially a bit of an aroma that I wrote off to not having run the heater for a year or so. Then, after I had gone out to the shop in many layers of insulation to paint the very buoys I usually painted in shirt sleeves, Ryan came out in sock feet and asked if I was aware of the house being full of smoke and the chimney puffing gray, gooey smoke.

After consulting my expert panel, I set about pulling apart the boiler, vacuuming out the gobs of soot and figuring out how to detach the burner unit from the boiler. There was a disintegrated gasket. There were pieces of what looked like a liner of the boiler chamber. After reassembling the pieces, I was discouraged enough to not bother trying to fire up the old beast.

Now I need to bring out a professional to resuscitate the system or buy a different and simpler heater to keep things tolerable and comfy for my baby and me.