39° and Overcast
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By James C. Johnston, Jr.
Is the world of government
and the state of our nation important? Well of course it is, but
there comes a time to relax the mind and put away the righteous
indignation we feel in the face of injustice for a moment or two. In
this well favored season of the year, we need to rise above
indignation and seek out a flower to sniff instead of reacting to the
bombing of this and the rage over that. Fortunately spring is
arriving just in time to help us with the escapism we need to save
our sanity.
Last
week I heard the “Peepers” singing out their songs of love which
advertises their availability to participate in the reproduction of
their species in a material way. So what am I talking about regarding
these tiny frog-like creatures? They sing out so sweetly, because
they want to make love! Now I think that it is a great thing that
they want to engage in this act of continuity of their kind. I also
think that it is very nice that the rest of us, who are not directly
involved in this amphibian romantic spring ritual, get to hear this
wonderful musical Peeper rendition of “Making Whoopee”. This
reaffirmation of life is something that makes me happy to be awake to
in this spring season of my life.
Now
when you think of the Peepers in the context of eternal lovers,
doesn’t their song of love take on a great new aspect? Or, am I
just over thinking this whole Peeper thing as a hopeless romantic?
Still, for me this Peeper love-anthem is the official start of the
blessed three month vernal season of rebirth which we embrace as
springtime.
This
is my eighty-first season of springtimes. In fact, I was born in the
springtime. Maybe that singular fact is why at my advanced age I’m
still an optimist! Maybe that’s why I feel forever young, that is,
until I try to stand up after sitting somewhere for a few minutes.
Then every joint of my body tries to tell me that I’m just trying
to delude myself and that I am not really all that youthful. I shall
ignore my aching joints and tell them to be at peace with me. I shall
pretend that the last fifty years have not yet happened, and for one
brief moment, I shall be young again.
Peepers
don’t live to get very old in terms of human years, and that’s
why we must enjoy them while they are in their all too short season
of courting their potential mates with their Peeper love songs.
Indeed, the sweet love songs of spring are sad songs, because we know
that spring is not ever-lasting. Nothing so fragile and beautiful is
everlasting, but the nature of beauty in the natural world is to
glory in its brief season.
Then spring must give way to something else which is also beautiful
like the flowers of each season reigning in glory in its turn. There
is adventure of the sighting of graceful and beautiful animals which
merge from their winter’s hibernation. There is the return of other
creatures from their winter’s migration to warmer places to give
joy to the human spirit. They have at last returned from where they
could breed and start a new generation of precious life. On wings,
that we can just envy, they flew away from the savage winter we mere
mortals had to endure. Just how beautiful is it to see the treasure
of new life take flight with beautiful feathered wings?
How
wonderful is it to see those first spring flowering plants like wild
Lady Slippers bravely breaking through the soil as they have for
thousands of years even before man came to the Americas. Jonquils and
tulips also burst into the sunlight as harbingers of the days of soft
spring rain and sunlight which will dance over the domestic gardens a
little later each day until the summer comes. Then the days will grow
progressively shorter in each succeeding cycle of twenty-four hours.
But we shall not think about that now. That is eighty odd days away,
and the beauty of nature, in its rotating season, is nothing to
regret as we soak up the time that we have the pleasure of it and let
it run over us like a gentle spring-perfumed breeze. Who cannot be in
love in a season like this?
I
can close my eyes now and go back in time more than sixty-odd years
ago to be on the campus of my old New England college when birdsong
and insect sounds, like the buzzing of bees among the new-born
blossoms of springtime, sounded their own anthem of love. To hear
those very sounds today brings me back more than
half-a-hundred-plus-ten-some-years to that happy time when my world
was new. Now I know that memory is our greatest treasure and love our
greatest gift.
