The rite of spring augurs rebirth, less girth and little mirth
Thursday marks the arrival of spring. For some, the season symbolizes fertility, hope and fresh starts. For the thermophobic normies out there, it is simply an oven preheating exercise, a dress rehearsal for the three-month thermal torment occasionally also called summer. One upside (and there’s just this one) to the warming weather is that it simplifies among the more “substantial” citizenry the plodding process of re-enacting the Battle of the Bulge, i.e. weight loss, via diaphoresis.
Every spring, members of the meaty masses remember well the Wehrmacht are enshrouded in the Ardennes. Yet we still sink lower into the sofa, switch to the Grapefruit League while shunning the citrus itself, brushing Frito flotsam off the Apple to check mess, and double-palming into purgatory the first scouts of the needle-nosed Nosferatus brought to life in the warmedup waterdrops on nonwaterproofed windowsills.
Yes, the biggest killer visible to the naked eye, mosquitoes, are wafting windward on genial gusts to an apartment block near you.
The Lake District’s daffodils must have been doused in DDT because the Romantic poet’s lines fail to give stanza space to swarms of hovering hypodermic syringes.
“The birds around me hopped and played, their thoughts I cannot measure, but the least motion which they made it seemed a thrill of pleasure,” wrote W squared.
The ancients weren’t as summerphobic as yours truly, it seems.
June is named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage, and July and August after perhaps the two most famous leaders of the republic/ empire: Julius and Augustus.
Perhaps Art Garfunkel, for whom I believe September was named, is more in line with orthodox summerphobes, for in June, his love will “change her tune, in restless walks, she’ll prowl the night. July, she will fly, and give no warning to her flight. August, die she must.”
I might take my aorta pulled to pieces like April Come She Will spurned boy than sunburn, sweat and skeeters, I’ll tell you what.
But in the meantime, like Ol’ Blue Eyes was wont to say, It Might as Well Be Spring.
If only the A Boy Named Sue’s singer were talking about Beijing when he said When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below).
But this truly can be an uplifting and sublime time of year, as Kobayashi Issa said with: “What a strange thing! To be alive beneath cherry blossoms.”
And who among you can forget Meng Haoran’s (689-740) lines:
“This spring morning in bed I’m lying, not to awake till the birds are crying. After one night of wind and showers, how many are the fallen flowers?”
And my Fritos and fish fingers (yes, they have them, how do you think they crawled ashore a mere 400 million years ago?) would not be possible without the corn and fish farms, whose stewards look to the change of seasons with hope and hoes, as in Happy Rain on a Spring Night by Du Fu (712-770): “Good rain knows its time right; It will fall when comes spring. With wind it steals in night; Mute, it moistens each thing.”