The face of winter

---

Springtime is back in Providence, and – I don’t know – it never cheers me up. When spring comes, I almost always feel tired and lethargic. There’s a feeling of: Here we go again. And a feeling of: How many times do we have to do this?

Anyway, I have been a little fatigued lately, and it has affected my usual good looks. I took a glance into the mirror at the office the other day, and I gasped: I looked awful. My graying hair was standing up in all directions, and my complexion was pale, and I was hunched over like an invalid. My god, I thought. I’m Old Man Winter.

It’s awful, because I know inside that my spirit is still young. And then I look into the mirror and see a crouching horrible gargoyle looking back at me.

I just passed the age of fifty-five last year, and it made me thoughtful. Partner and I still have a few years together, I hope, before my bones begin to crumble into sawdust, or before the next asteroid hits.

We will stumble on together for a while, at least, in happiness. Every day together is a blessing.

I only hope Partner can endure seeing the face of Old Man Winter first thing every morning for a few years more.

---

Unenchanted April

---

Poets used to love springtime. Remember Chaucer?:

 

 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye . . .       Or how about some Shakespeare?     It was a lover and his lass,   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,   That o'er the green corn-field did pass,   In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,   When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; Sweet lovers love the spring.       Eh.       I myself do not much like the spring. It can be very pretty, granted, and I do think crocuses and daffodils are very nice. But there’s something a little – I don’t know – relentless about it. And I notice that, over the past hundred years, a few poets seem to be agreeing with me.       How about that ol’ T. S. Eliot?:       April is the cruellest month, breeding   Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing   Memory and desire, stirring   Dull roots with spring rain.         But my personal favorite is New England’s own Edna St. Vincent Millay:       To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.       I love those last few lines.       Happy springtime, everyone!

Lilacs

---

I was walking the other day at lunchtime when one of my co-workers called over to me: “The lilacs are blooming over there.”

 

 

She gestured over at the animal-rescue place across the street, which has a flowery hedge. And their lilacs were in full bloom.

 

 

Lilacs (well, Syringa if you're a snob) send me into reverie every spring.  The house I lived in when I was very small had a lilac hedge; they were all purple except one, which was creamy heavenly white. The scent was heavenly also. It’s heavy and can be oppressive (I wore lilac scent for a while some years ago, and was probably the bane of the office), but – in small doses, and when you smell it on the breeze on an April day – it’s wonderful.

 

 

They remind me of Walt Whitman, and the death of Abraham Lincoln, by way of “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.”

 

 

They remind me of Milton Berle, who camped it up on the old “Batman” TV series as the dandy gangster Louie the Lilac.

 

 

They remind me of New Hampshire, which uses the lilac as its floral symbol, and good for them.

 

 

I think they were probably one of the first flowers I ever examined closely. I remember wondering at those huge clusters of much smaller flowers, and having a dim intuition that it was very smart of the lilac bush to make big floral explosions out of hundreds of smaller blossoms.

 

 

They are lovely.

 

 

Admire them while they last.

---

 

Skunk cabbage

---

I wrote a blog not long ago about how warm the winter and early spring have been here in southern New England, and how all the plants are confused and blooming out of season. 

 

 

It was an apocalyptic screed, and I wanted to write something more mellow to counter it.

 

 

Early flowers are not entirely a bad thing.  They are lovely. Right now, in early spring, the magnolias are blooming on the Brown campus.  The azaleas are blooming near my office building!  I’ve seen dandelions in bloom!  And there’s something in the grass outside our apartment that looks almost like carpet bugle, with tiny purple blossoms, but much smaller.

 

 

All this in early spring.

 

 

(Ahem.  Global warming / climate change / apocalypse. Ahem.)

 

 

The other day we were driving through rural Connecticut (to go to Foxwoods – why else would we be driving through rural Connecticut?), and I was watching the drab early-spring scenery rush by.  And I saw, in a low unruly-looking place among trees, skunk cabbage coming up!

 

 

It took me back.  I don’t know if East Coast skunk cabbage is the same as the West Coast variety I used to see in Washington state, but it looks exactly the same.  Those big shiny green leaves!  Those big juicy yellow flowers that smell like rotting meat!

 

 

That, my friends, is the nasty sulfurous aroma of rebirth.

 

 

Welcome, Connecticut skunk cabbage.  We’re very glad to see you. 

 

 

You're the real herald of spring.

---

 

 

Seed-catalog nirvana

---

It is the worst bit of winter now here in New England. January and February are not bright cheerful months hereabouts; they are a long slow death-slog through snow and cold and ice and mush.  Wednesday's mini-blizzard dumped about fifteen inches of snow on us. Partner and I both had the day off – the university (wisely) closed preemptively the day before – so we stayed in the house, reading and napping and watching TV and baking. We ducked out for a while in the afternoon to shovel out the car, which took about ten minutes (thank god the building has a guy with a snowblower handy), but that was about it. Oh, and also, I took out the garbage, opened the dumpster, saw something big and furry scooting around, assumed it was a rat, shrieked, threw my garbage at it, realized (too late) that it was just Partner's favorite neighborhood squirrel, and let the dumpster lid slam down right on the poor little nutmonkey's kidney. He leapt straight up, landed on the Sno-Cat that was parked next to the dumpster, and disappeared.

 

 

I bet he really hates me now.

 

 

So it's time for seed catalogs. I dug out the Gurney's catalog yesterday evening and spent some time perusing the various fruits and vegetables and flowering plants. I love that they send these things for free. Man, you can just eat those colors! When you read these things, you always end up with huge visions of summertime – squash as big as a human head, ears of corn like torpedoes, tomatoes like volleyballs, a flower garden that looks like Middle-Earth on crack.

 

 

Unfortunately, all I have to work with is a concrete parking-lot and a very narrow windowsill.

 

 

Partner and I tilled a small plot in the local community garden for a few years. It was fun, but not very productive; everyone there was very competitive. One guy had gigantic steroid-enhanced tomato plants that looked like oak trees; that was the year of the Great Tomato Blight, though, so all the little yellow tomato blossoms dropped off before they set any fruit.

 

 

Tee hee.

 

 

You see? It turned me into a horrible person. Finally I quit doing it.

 

 

I mean, it's silly to read a seed catalog if you don't have a garden. It's like reading a cookbook if you don't have any food in the house. You're just going to make yourself hungrier.

 

 

But it doesn't seem to work that way. It's more like buying a lottery ticket. Yeah, maybe you waste a buck, or a few minutes of your time, but you come away with a beautiful dream, and a smile on your face.

 

 

And now, in the dark days of January, with a predatory squirrel on the loose who thirsts for my blood, I can use all the beautiful dreams I can get.

 

---