Two Springs

My dad and I had a long-running argument about the actual start date of the seasons. I won't bore you with my pedantic predilections; suffice it to say he was slowly coming around to my way of thinking.

After a day like today, he might have sworn fealty forever to my method. What a spring day! I sat in the yellow chair in his favorite spot down by the marsh and let the sun dry my tears.

Here's a piece he called "Two Springs."

Always two springs in the Northeast. One early spring, mean and rainy cold, low, scudding clouds, pewter- gray like an October sky. The land still brooding, the patient kid waiting his turn. The woods dark and unfriendly, a hostile army massed for assault.

And then, spring days like this: brilliant sunshine, sky as blue as baby Harlan’s eyes, the light so brittle, sharp, and transparent it makes giant holograms of the bushes and shrubs painting them all in bas relief. The eyes struggle to take it in. The landscape now beginning to strut. Lemon yellow daffodils splashed across the woodlot’s floor, Magnolias a defiant white on an artist’s pallet. Forsythia ringing the land more yellow than the slickers on the road crew out front. Crab apple buds surging.

He sits in the Adirondack chair at the top of the slope. The dog lays at his feet and basks in the warming sun. Down below, his middle son, horticulturist by inclination and trade, clears the winter kill ringing the marsh. The special quiet of a Saturday afternoon rests on the gardens.

But broken a bit.

Behind him in the house the volume up just enough for him to hear, Michael Kaye and Jim Kaat are on the tube, trying to pull the New York Yankees through the Kansas City game, trying to snap a short losing string as Derek Jeter homers in the eighth to pull them ahead. But now the Royals have come back in the ninth and Mariano Rivera has come in to put out the fire.

He calls down to his son to come up and watch the drama unfold. But he holds up a transistor radio and stays where he is. The Yankees get out of that hole as Rivera in mid-season form strikes out the next two hitters and ends it.

The sun is dropping now behind the woods in the west. He’d had enough and was stiff from sitting too long. Age and his cursed infirmity, he knew. He picked up the walking stick he used to get around the grounds and went inside. The dog followed.

That night, the gardening son is back along with his mate and little Harlan and his oldest son and his wife and their three children. They’d come for dinner, a going-away affair for his wife who was leaving that week for Rome to help out their youngest son and his wife with their new baby.

For dinner that night, she’d made three separate dishes to fit everybody’s favorite taste, lamb shanks, chicken pot pie for the kids and spinach lasagna for the vegetarians. It was a festive and convivial evening. The conversation was lively; the camaraderie flowed along with good wine. Underneath it all was the sense of good fortune and gratitude and the unspoken wish that it could go on forever.

The next day was cold. The daffodils drooped in disgust. Spring in the Northeast. He loved it.