By Tobin BarnesIt’s been officially spring for a few days now, but I’m not buying it. Sell that myth to some other fool besides this fool.
Not that I don’t want spring.
Oh please, I do. Please.
After dragging my behind across the rigors of winter, I crave spring. I’ve even cleaned out my golf bag from last summer, I want it so.
But where we live here in the Black Hills of SoDak, spring is just a tease. A stormy harlot.
That’s right. Spring is a frustration, not a reality.
I’m sure some places get spring when the calendar says it’s spring. (What a blissful coincidence that would be.) These places get a solid couple months of high fifties through pleasantly low seventies.
Not only that, they get daffodils, tulips, flowering shrubbery, and blossoming fruit trees. Those lucky people tiptoe through these delights. That’s where the song came from. Maybe even Tiny Tim and Miss Vicky.
Happy folk, these, who get the whole schmear that people in northern climes only fantasize about.
And like I said, their spring lasts for what you’d actually call a season.
Not here, my friend. Here spring is not a season. It’s a mind game.
In the Black Hills, spring is a heaping dose of late winter that grudgingly gives way to only a few days of what southerners would recognize as springtime and then immediately catapults into an early summer with days in the eighties and oftentimes nineties.
Right about now in late March, we’re typically still dodging blizzards and the consequent week-long meltdowns that occur just after them. Actually, it’s during the meltdowns that we get some of our best “springtime” weather. These are nice clear warm days, but gees louise, it’s all wasted melting down three-foot drifts.
What good is nice weather when you’re tromping around in wet snow, mud, and puddles? It’s like, give me a break—you’re torturing me, man!
And this can go on right up until the end of April, for crying out loud.
The poet T.S. Eliot said, “April is the cruelest month.” I’m thinking he was maybe clandestinely visiting some now unknown friend or relative here in the Black Hills one spring during the late 1920’s when he desolately penned those bleak lines.
Not long after, in a continued fit of melancholy, Eliot changed his nationality from American to British. I’m telling you we lost him as one of the great American writers to be one of the great English writers because of a Black Hills spring.
Occasionally, in April, we get some nice days in the 50’s, maybe even 70’s. But that’s what makes the month cruel. Just as the tulips and daffodils are warily coaxed above ground, happy in their dainty springtime finery, a hard frost or a foot of snow slams down on them.
Wracked with cold, they are no longer shiny, happy tulips and daffodils.
They are sad tulips. Tortured tulips. Miserable tulips.
Tulips that wish they’d never been planted. Maybe even resentful tulips.
I used to think that people who plant tulip and daffodil bulbs in this part of the country were Mary Sunshine optimists.
But after living here for over thirty years, I’ve changed my mind.
Now I think they’re sadists--hard-hearted flower inquisitors selfishly reveling in the nasty vagaries of April...the cruelest month.
