When I bought my ticket for the Portland Flower Show, I wasn’t planning to barricade myself in the Portland Co. building until some credible authority convinced me that winter was irrevocably and irreversibly over. But when I entered the building and crossed over from winter hell into spring paradise, my fate was sealed.

The transition was no less dramatic for me than Dorothy being transported via tornado from her dull, desolate black-and-white farm life to the incredible Technicolor world of Oz. This year’s show was themed “A Taste of Spring,” but for me it was a full-blown buffet, more appropriately named “A Smorgasbord of Spring.” I was ready to feast. Green plants! Smell of dirt! Flowers, for God’s sake! My eyes started tearing up even before my wife and I got past the vendors’ section.

After an hour of strolling around the show, I hatched my plan. I was going to hide in the men’s room until after closing time, then, when all the event and exhibitor staff left for the night, I’d barricade the building doors from the inside and set up residence in the cabin-by-the-pond exhibit. I was sure I could survive in this highly livable, lush environment. Admittedly, this brilliant plan would be hard to explain to my wife, but she’d just have to understand.

It’s been a brutal winter, worse than most, and there were earlier signs of my mental deterioration. While watching a past episode of “Game of Thrones” and hearing a member of the Stark clan chant their family’s oft-stated, foreboding motto – “Winter is coming.” – I threw off my blanket, jumped to my feet and yelled at the TV: “What’s wrong with you people! Don’t you know, winter is here!”

“Calm down,” my wife said, sitting next to me on the couch. “It’s just a TV show.”

“No!” I cried. “They don’t understand. They think their lives are terrible with all that murder and brutality and war. They don’t live in Maine. In the winter.”

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In the end, things didn’t go exactly as planned. A security guard found me hiding in the bathroom and called the Portland Police, who had to chase me around the facility, ducking behind stone walls, climbing up small trees and splashing into a man-made pond.

I don’t remember any of this very well, but I read a copy of the police report. The reporting officer claimed that I yelled, “You’ll never take me alive, coppers!” Of course, this is all a bit embarrassing, especially to my poor wife.

I’m OK now. The temperature is a spring-like 72 degrees where I am now, and the doctors and staff here are very pleasant. They say I suffer from an increasingly common new diagnosis. I can’t remember the Greek/medical name of the phobia I’ve acquired, but it translates to “extreme fear of a never-ending winter.”

They promise me I’ll get better when the weather outside warms. But I’m not taking this on anyone’s authority. I’ll believe it when I feel it.


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