One of my infallible signs of spring is when I’m out on my morning meander and first smell skunk. The wet weather dampens the force of it but adds a thickness that holds the scent in the air. I might never see the skunk, but I always know one has been there.

The first third of this year sped downhill like I was a ten year old boy on a bike, wobbling and terrified, but as I emerged into May, I realized I didn’t feel like I’d gotten much done, personally or creatively.

For the longest time, I’ve told myself I have to write every day, that a story or a novel has a momentum you risk if you don’t maintain it. I’ve always been disciplined about my writing time, either counting hours when I’m not sure where the story is going, numbers of words or pages once I’m launched or if I’m revising or editing. Like a baseball player, I have routines and rituals and talismans designed to keep me working.  But in the noise and the chaos of the current month, I realize that, like every other living thing, I have seasons.

I once attended a writing workshop with J. A. Jance, where she opined that a person’s creative energy probably topped out at about the length of time it takes for two well-matched people to play a game of chess. I am starting to wonder, in my near-dotage, if a rigid discipline is the best use of a limited supply of creative energy.

So I’m starting to play with what my seasons might be, whether the winter is the best time to dig deep for my work, the spring and summer a time to breathe, live outdoors, connect with the world.

I’ve loosened the self-imposed bonds more than I have been willing to, taking a day off here or there, putting in extra time when I have some unexpectedly. My level of productivity worries me less now than I worry about being too rigid, about missing a good story or poem or essay idea because I’m too busy plowing my slow straight furrow.

Oh, the slow straight furrow. In 1983, Anne and I took counseling from an Episcopal minister in Peterborough, New Hampshire, prefatory to our marriage the next year. In conversation, said cleric opined that I was the type to “plow a slow straight furrow.” Not liking the idea of being told who I was or what I was like, I resisted the idea. But everything I’ve learned about myself since then has taught me I’m a linear type, inclined to an excessive rationality and a focus on one thing at a time.

But spring is also the time for change. And if I can believe in a skunk I cannot see, can’t I believe in my own change?