Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

Check out the song. It’s A beautiful jazz standard. Try Ella Fitzgerald’s or Stan Getz’s or Rickey Lee Jones’ or many others.

If jazz isn’t your thing, head for the dark humor with Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler and Germany.” Of course, these days Hitler jokes aren’t as funny as they used to be.

Ten years ago we headed out with my romantic notion of tracking spring up the east coast from Key West, Florida back home to Vermont.  That didn’t exactly go as planned. We were fine heading up the coast in 70- and 80-degree weather. Then the first cold wave came bringing heavy rain to Jacksonville and Southern Georgia.  When we woke up up there was a deep frost and people were talking about the damage to the magnolia blossoms. Sprinkled in with many nice days there were three separate snowstorms before we arrived home.  It was not my fantasy.

A few weeks ago I had plans for the blog that told all about how we got it right this time.  We were sunscreening and sweating and appreciating so many different wildflowers you can’t imagine. In the beginning I took photos of each new wildflower but after a while there were so many that I thought I would fill up the memory in my phone, or the cloud, or wherever they get stored. and it wasn’t just the flowers.  Wherever we walked there were newborn lambs, sheep, and horses. Then the rains came.  After the 10th straight day of rain, and temps still in the 50s I’m starting to think I’ve miscalculated once again.

Maybe the problem is my romantic concept of spring?  Spring was never just sunny warm days with birds singing, children playing, and flowers lifting their heads to the sun.  The real spring has lots of rain, wind, and days that are best spent inside. In Vermont that includes the snowstorms, late deep frosts, and lots of mud.  Perhaps it’s time to let go of these romantic notions?  After all, look what the romanticism in Germany led to.

I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring.

I do, don’t you?  Of course you do

– “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,”  Tom Lehrer, (From Another Evening

Wasted with Tom Lehrer, 1959)

J.