It’s on.
It’s official. Spring is here.
Trees are having unprotected sex all around me, and buds are exploding everywhere, nowhere to go but out into the world. And if less salubrious souls (like myself, for instance) have to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous allergy reactions, it seems a fair price to pay for all this useful beauty. For a few weeks, we can play wingmen while Nature does it’s thing. The sweet smell of manure, I mean mulch, holds sway. The hills are alive! The deepening greens of the tentative grass signify an immutable reincarnation: look at it, eager to stretch out and show the world what it’s been thinking all winter, keeping it on the down low during the cold stretch, waiting its turn to be reborn.
Even the animals are getting in on the act: squirrels are everywhere, paired off in couples, rolling around with an abandon that seems at once reckless and purposeful. Of course, I cannot honestly ascertain if these creatures are fucking or fighting (or both, or neither). I wonder: should I be disappointed with myself and my relative ignorance in these matters? Then I think: am I supposed to know? Haven’t humans made sufficient advances over the years so that I don’t have to trouble myself actually understanding this type of shit? Certainly, I could stand to be more acquainted with the earth, and the ecology, and the types of slow, studious observations that enable more scientific minds to determine the difference between two squirrels fussin’ and two squirrels fornicating. But then, I could also be more acquainted with cold, and hunger, and polio, and tuberculosis, and child slavery and the myriad anti-blisses our ancestors’ ingenuity afforded me the luxury to remain ignorant of.
All of which is to say, it’s on; it’s Spring.
Even though the warming days still cool off considerably once the sun sets and we prepare for a great deal of rain (April showers and all that), Spring once again can sense its own strength. To which I say, give me some Leos Janacek, that great Czech composer. To me, his second string quartet (“Intimate Letters”) is inextricable from the month of April. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that I first got exposed to this music in the early days of springtime, back in the days when Spring still meant the eventual end of another semester. And, I think, perhaps Proust and Pavlov were both correct about the ways we associate memories and lost time.
