Geoffrey Chaucer, corralling his raucous band of fictional travelers, may claim that spring is a time for pilgrimage, but the rest of the world knows that spring is the time to fall in love. And not just with a person — though that's wonderful — but with the whole gestalt of a post-winter life.
There's a reason Cole Porter has birds doing it and bees doing it. Because love is always in the spring air and it makes us more alive.
Except, of course, in the cold climes. Round these parts it's easy enough to get flu; it's a lot harder to get spring fever.
Since I grew up around here (with every winter a season of my discontent), I thought spring was a complete fiction, the stuff of Ideal magazine retouched photo-essays. It wasn't until I was a student in London, living near Hampstead Heath that I realized things could actually grow from the ground during the academic year. When I did my graduate work in Virginia, I was pleased — stunned! — to discover that daffodils really are the first blossom of spring and not simply the yellow plastic flowers that decorated my childhood Easter baskets.
And for a year I lived just south of the rainforest in coastal Washington state, where at night the spring winds blew and I would wake up to see my ancient Plymouth Fury station wagon blanketed in bright, fallen camellias. I was broke, but I had flowers.
Since then, I've mostly lived in colder regions where it's tempting to agree with T.S. Eliot that "April is the cruelest month." And this year it's especially hard to get that I'm-in-the-mood-for-love mojo going as I walk the dog once more across the gulag of ice that is my backyard, as I scrape my current old-model station wagon for the umpteenth time of various kinds of snow-related precipitation and as I don the hefty winter coat that makes me look like nothing so much as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from "Ghostbusters."
What I want is for spring to come and take my coat off my shoulders and rub her tender hands up and down my winter-white arms. I want to unwind my neck from one of the many scarves in which it has been mummy-wrapped since fall and feel spring breathe her soft breath on my skin.
They say that patience is a virtue. But those who say that have never had spring fever, from which I am feverishly suffering.
The only solution — for now — is to break out the poetry. And in particular, now is the time for that great master of love and spring: ee cummings.
No one summons both with such seductive language as he does. After all, this is the man who wrote, with fetching irony: "who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you," this man for whom syntax was a way of life, but perhaps kissing even more so.
This is the man who describes spring as "mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful" (which, as I take these phrases out of context sound kinda porno-corno-graphic).
This is the man who said "while Spring is in the world/my blood approves,/and kisses are better fate/than wisdom." And that is choice advice as far as I'm concerned.
So when ee cummings says:
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched and
poked
thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring),
I am enchanted into believing that both love and spring are soon to be in the air again.
Jo Page's email address is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at >www.jo-page.com>.