3 • SPRINGING FORWARD
April is the cruelest month, T. S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant
(among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too
much, the world burgeons with promises it can’t keep, all passion is really
a setup, and we’re doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and
would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go there anyway, around
the bend, unconditionally. I’m a soul on ice flung out on a rock in the sun,
where the needles that pierced me begin to melt all as one.
On the new edge of springtime when I stand on the front porch shad-
ing my eyes from the weak morning light, sniffing out a tinge of green on
the hill and the scent of yawning earthworms, oh, boy, then! I roll like a
bear out of hibernation. The maple buds glow pink, the forsythia breaks
into its bright yellow aria. These are the days when we can’t keep our-
selves indoors around here, any more than we believe what our eyes keep
telling us about the surrounding land, i.e., that it is still a giant mud pud-
dle, now lacking its protective covering of ice. So it comes to pass that one
pair of boots after another run outdoors and come back mud- caked—
more shoes than we even knew we had in the house, proliferating like
wild portobellos in a composty heap by the front door. So what? Noah’s
kids would have felt like this when the fl ood had almost dried up: muddy
boots be hanged. Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful.
I’m nuts.
Our household was a week into high spring fever when Lily and I de-