Blue Skies At Last

Spring is the season of the charlatans, it’s the season of the seducer and sales pitch, the prediction and prophecy.

It’s the season of the street corner: who’s gonna win the Series, who’s going to win the election, repent, the apocalypse is here, go to the end of the world to seek your fortune.

Spring is the season of the sure thing, though not the one in November or at the Derby, or at the end of The Hit List, but the one right on the ground: it’s the season of the robin and spatzie building nests, singing songs. It’s the season of the baby carriage, the puppies, the blue skies at last. It’s the season dancing the something or other, just dancing, or the season of celebrating beauty.

Spring is the eternal do-over, the start-over. It’s the season of fresh things growing straight up out of the ground, the blessing without disguise.

It’s (finally) spring, and we think it may be here to stay, hopefully without rushing shortly after Wednesday into endless summer. Summer and winter: the bearers of severe and extreme temperatures and climate, storms and sturm and drang.

Spring is making things: houses, gardens, nests high in the tree, love and babies. Look how it is: a toddler in a carriage who’s never seen you before smiles at you nonetheless, knowing none of your secrets or habits.

In the spring in Washington, it’s the world of bicycles that have multiplied faster than rabbits can even dream of multiplying, but must be trying anyway.

Spring when it works properly is always nothing but blue skies from now on until. . . . It’s about being born again in that season, every year through time. For sure the baby thinks so, and the new-job-I-just-got guy thinks so, and everyone in love thinks so and some of us older who should know better think so.

Spring and its blossom end suddenly, unforgettably, but the music and its memory don’t end at all. It inspires because as E. E. Cummings noted:

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful. . .