It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, Hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.
This is the first verse of one of Shakespeare's most famous lyrics. It has been set to music countless times, my favorite being a setting for tenor and lute by Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Morley. (Elizabethan lute songs are one of my great weaknesses; I find them as irresistible as cashews.)
Shakespeare's lyric stands midway in a long tradition among English poets of celebrating the arrival of spring. From "Sumer is y-comen in, Lhude sing cuckoo," written around 1250 by that famous medieval English poet Anonymous, to Robert Herrick's famous Corrina's Going A-Maying and beyond, bards have been celebrating springtime as a joyous festival of renewal, flowers, birds, trees and fresh-air sex.
My own father, a great appreciator of fine art, oft-times told me of the sign he once encountered while driving along a rural back road somewhere north of Spokane, Washington: "Hurray, Hurray, the first of May! Outdoor screwin' starts today!" The poet exulted.
You can't get more eloquent than that.
I have to admit that for a long time I simply did not understand what all the fuss was about. I'm not talking specifically about love among the mosquitoes, but the larger issue of getting all excited about the spring. My feeling was, aside from the beginning of the baseball season, what's so bloody great about it?
This was because of my upbringing, of course. I grew up in southern California where it's pretty much warm all the time. When I was a kid I preferred the fall to the spring, excepting of course for that dreary business of having to return to school. Fall meant the shorter days which in turn led to my birthday (I was born in October) and then Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Once I got past the distasteful business of summer vacation being over with, the autumn was a procession of things to look forward to.
Spring? Eh. May in San Diego is pretty much like January in San Diego. Maybe three or four degrees warmer.
I got my first taste of spring euphoria, my first taste of what all those English and German poets were rhapsodizing about, when I was 13. The summer before my 13th birthday my family moved to the aforementioned Spokane, Washington. The year was 1968. We lived there for two years and then moved back to California. But when I went back to Spokane briefly, nearly 30 years later, to run a bed-and-breakfast, I found that if you asked people who had lived there all their lives whether they remembered the Great Winter of '68-'69, virtually all them did, and remembered it vividly.
It just so happened that the Dupuis moved to Spokane in the year when that part of the country saw its worst winter in 80 years. I, who had known little but sunshine since the second grade, found myself, now in the eighth grade, experiencing the kind of winter you would normally associate with a place like Minnesota. We were up to our asses in snow for almost four months. That stuff was on the ground from mid-December to early April. And between the snowplows and the shoveling, in some places it was piled up higher than I was tall. I came and went to and from school in it --fortunately we lived only one block from my school. The ice got so bad that I used to watch the bus drivers coming over the hill up the street from where we lived, locking their brakes and sliding the buses down the hill at a 45-degree angle in order not to lose control of them. I actually rode on a couple of those buses -- riding the bus to downtown Spokane was a regular "Saturday" thing we did -- and enjoyed the thrill of those wild rides. (The drivers didn't enjoy them, believe me.)
My mother got so disgusted with the winter that at one point she took all of the frozen food out of the freezer and threw it in the backyard as a form of protest that she had to be in Spokane at all. "If it's going to be ten below zero all winter, I might as well give the goddamn freezer a rest," she said. In April we were still finding frozen peas out there.
But in April it was still pretty cold. Spokane is at an elevation of over 2,000 feet and the chill can persist well into May. My dad took me and my friend Glenn out for the fishing opener that year on Fan Lake, between Spokane and the Canadian border. When we pushed our boat away from the dock that morning, it must have been 15 degrees on that lake. I was never so cold in my life.
And we didn't catch a single fish.
But it was ever-so-gradually warming up, and then came one weekend in May when the temperature spiked up into the sixties. Doesn't sound too warm, does it? Ask anyone from Wisconsin about this. When you've been walking around in temperatures ranging from 20 below to 35 above for three months, and all of a sudden a day comes along when it pokes up to 65, you think summer has arrived. You're ready to bust out the sunscreen and go sit in the yard with a daiquiri.
I was too young for a daiquiri, but believe me, I felt the intoxication. It was warm! I looked out the window and noticed that the trees had leaves on them again! The snow was gone! And, childhood being the festival of ever-ongoing anticipations that it is, my mind began wandering in the delicious direction of...summer vacation! (You thought I was going to say 'love,' didn't you?) I was 13, remember? Shelley sang, "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Kids amend that to, "If spring comes, can the last day of school be far behind?"
Simon and Garfunkel had a hit record that spring, a bit of silliness called Baby Driver. It's about a kid who is alternately under-supervised, over-horny and very fond of racing motorcycles. My sister had the 45-rpm version of it and was playing it all the time. Its brazen joyousness and bouncy rhythm came to symbolize that mighty, ravishing spring of '69 for me. To this day, whenever I hear Baby Driver, I think of that incredible weekend in my youth when springtime seemed to burst upon us all in one dizzy moment, on the heels of what had been a long, chilly and gray hibernation.
I would not experience anything similar until I was an adult. My family only lived in Spokane for one more winter, which was much, much milder than the first, and then we were back in California, where I lived through high school, college and right through my twenties.
But in 1985 I joined the Foreign Service, and that meant Washington, D.C. I had been to D.C. one previous time, about five years earlier, but it was a one-week vacation which moreover took place in the late summer. I was 30 years old now and had not really experienced winter since junior high school.
I arrived in Washington in November. It was unseasonably warm for the first few days, but then, in the words of one of the local TV weathercasters, Mother Nature "turned on the refrigrator," and I was glad for the warm overcoat I'd brought with me. My training group was quickly transplanted to Warrenton, Virginia, about 50 miles west of D.C., where the State Department trains its telecommunications people.
So there we all were, out in rural Fauquier County, VA. Horse country. And then it started to snow. We had a white Christmas. D.C. doesn't usually have severe winters, but the winter of '85-'86 was, if not severe by midwest or New England standards, sufficiently cold and snowy to make us feel that we were winter-bound, particularly those of us who hailed from places like California and Arizona, which several of us did.
In training that winter I met and briefly dated a beautiful girl, a few years my junior, named Holly Brayton. The dating was brief because we were both getting ready to leave the country and she was leaving first. But for two weeks or so we saw each other almost every evening, and I'll never forget those drives: here I was, a kid from California with very little experience of driving in snow, making that trek down snowy and icy Virginia county roads night after night, covering the 20 miles between Warrenton and Manassas Park, where Holly had a condo.
By then I had been handed my first overseas assignment, Frankfurt-am-Main, in what was in those days still called West Germany. Holly, by contrast, was on her way to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in perpetually-hot sub-Sarahan Africa. I would get my own taste of sub-Saharan Africa a few years later, when I was assigned to Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, just a hop to the right on the map from Liberia. But for now I was on my way to central Europe.
I was thrilled of course. I'd been wanting to visit Europe all my life, and now I was going there for a two-year tour of duty. I wouldn't have traded assignments with Holly for anything (though I secretly sighed that she wasn't coming to Germany with me.)
It was a chilly, gray day when I left Washington, and it was a chilly gray day when I arrived in Frankfurt.
Anyone who's ever lived in central Europe is familiar with what the Germans call Stark Bewoelkt. The term refers to Germany's stubborn, some would say perpetual overcast. The Austrian and Swiss alps which separate central Europe from Italy also separate it from much of southern Europe's famous sunshine, which is one of the reasons why Robert Browning had "Italy" tatooed over his heart, and I would not be surprised to learn that it was also one of the reasons that Goethe suddenly sprang from his bed in Weimar one night in 1786, jumped into a coach, pointed it south and stayed in Italy for the next two years.
The point is that Germany is what might be charitably called "misty." It sees gray skies more than blue ones. Consequently you see Germans anywhere and everywhere outside their own country where there's a beach. They're photophiles, the Germans, and anyone who has lived in their country knows why. I arrived in Frankfurt on March 13, 1986. For the first three days I was there we didn't see the sun at all. When it finally managed to poke through the cloud-ceiling, it wasn't much.
So there I was. It was mid-March and I had just segue'd directly from cold, gray Washington to chilly, gray Germany. What little sun I had seen for the previous three months had mostly generated uncomfortable glare from all of the icy streets and roads it was being reflected in, over which I was driving bundled up in coats and sweaters. I was, in short, experiencing the first genuine, unrelieved winter of my life since childhood.
Small wonder, then, that when the season of the poets returned, I noticed. You bet I did. During a breathtakingly short series of days in May, Frankfurt seemed to come back to life. Trees were suddenly full of leaves again. I awoke in the morning to hear birds twittering. Flowers bloomed. My neighbor Jack Robinson, a political officer whom I had never seen in anything but a suit and tie, was suddenly outside in rubber boots digging in the mud, preparing to plant something in the few square feet of dirt outside the apartment building. Frankfurt sits at a latitude roughly equivalent to that of Toronto, which means that when the days begin getting longer, they really begin getting longer. Suddenly you saw children playing outside until eight or nine O'clock at night.
And then there was the day when I decided to go out and ride my bicycle, just to enjoy the weather. The sun actually shone, a real treat in Germany, and it was warm enough to go outside without a jacket.
I rode my bicycle for a short distance in the general direction of the Frankfurt Zoo. On the way I encountered a little canal, on the other side of which someone had planted...strawberries!
If there's one smell that my mind associates unmistakeably with summer, it's the smell of strawberries. I stopped my bike dead on the dirt path alongside that little canal and just stood there for a minute, sniffing the strawberries and thinking of summer. It took me back inexorably to that wonderful afternoon when I was 13 and the sudden inrush of a spring day had me dreaming of summer vacation, which was now, after all, only a few weeks away.
So now I know what the poets meant. I also know what John Steinbeck meant when, in Travels with Charley, he wrote, "I've lived in climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I prefer weather." He then goes on to ask how anyone who lives in Florida can appreciate warmth, which is all they ever feel, or greenness, which is all they ever see. As a California native I can certainly relate to that. Steinbeck, who had lived in Mexico, knew what he was talking about.
You can't appreciate spring unless you've known winter. It's only March as I write these words and spring is only three days along, but you can feel things gradually picking up, even here in Washington.
By god, when the weather gets a little warmer still, maybe I'll get crazy and see if I can get my wife to go a-Maying.
Anybody know what the heck "a-Maying" is, anyway?*
Yeah, I know. Some smartass is going to say "Outdoor screwing."
Ole.
*Actually, my friend Dianne did some research and "outdoor screwing" isn't far off the mark. In Merrie England, "going a-Maying" was a delightful ritual wherein the boys would more-or-less persuade the girls to go out into the fields where the tall grass was and...Well, let's just say that a lot of weddings generally followed.
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