There are few things I miss more living in the tropics than the change of seasons. We have them here and they occur randomly around the various equinoxes and solstices and last approximately 13.25 minutes. Sometimes they occur in the middle of the night and you miss them entirely. Days really do just run into each other with little to no distinction. On the mainland, seasons meant changes were coming.
While autumn was always my favorite season (the holidays are coming!) and summer my second favorite (NO SCHOOL!), Spring was in there punching. The sensation of warmth and freshness during those first few days of the season are sure hard to beat. But Spring also seemed like a lot of work. You could fall into summer and cruise into fall but Spring took a lot of prep work. Homelife was picking up its pace.
When I was very young can remember my mother really taking “Spring cleaning” to heart. The windows would be thrown open, mattresses and bulky bedding would be moved out into the sun. The house was scrubbed from top to bottom. After the inside she moved outside. She seemed to really like evergreens so that first house of mine was surrounded by conifers, and Azaleas and Rhododendrons.
My parents would take the station wagon to the nursery and come back with huge bails of peat moss (loved by her preferred plants) and occasionally some young shrubbery. The bails were fascinating as they seemed bigger than I was and they were almost always yellow plastic stretched so tightly they begged for little fingers to punch their way through. As they lay in the sunshine you could see moisture condensing on the inside of the plastic and that only made the temptation more severe. When those bails were finally breeched the world became filled with the hot, moist aroma of peat that haunts me to this day and will forever mean “Spring” to me.
When you are a kid time passes and if things are supposed to happen, you rely on the grownups around you to handle that kind of stuff. At least it was that way in the good old days. I was but a leaf in the wind; told when to sleep, wake, eat, be educated, play, go to church, celebrate, etc. So somewhere soon after the advent of Spring I would be told it was soon time for the Easter Bunny to make an appearance.
Easter was so much more laid back than Christmas. Coloring eggs and eating ham didn’t seem to get all the hype Christmas did but it still meant a week off from school! I remember one Easter, Mom decided it was time to get back to the earth and she made the kids sit on the porch and grate our own horseradish. You had to do it outside otherwise the fumes would kill everything in the house that breathed. Luckily I was was little enough to pretty much avoid the labor and just enjoy my siblings cursing their fate and that wonderful nose clearing fragrance that was mixing with the warm Spring breeze.
Once back at school we would start rehearsals for our one major public performance of the year: THE SPRING CONCERT! At the time it was just another things I was told to do and never questioned. In retrospect I really should have asked why we were singing “ Rock A My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” and a whaling song that featured lyrics about combing our hair with cod fish bones. One little ditty we sang made sense and I remember to this day: APRIL SHOWERS. Not a bad drag/porn name huh? The tune was easy to sing and featured that blind optimism that you could still believe in when you were 7 years old.
I think I may have missed the Hawaiian Spring this year, I was probably in the bathroom.
APRIL SHOWERS lyrics by B. G. De Sylva.
Though April showers may come your way,
They bring the flowers that bloom in May.
So if it’s raining, have no regrets,
Because it isn’t raining rain, you know, it’s raining violets.
And when you see clouds upon the hills,
You soon will see crowds of daffodils,
So keep on looking for a blue bird, And listening for his song,
Whenever April showers come along.
The Fat of Now 