The poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson once said, and I quote, “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” I guess when I was a young man those thought’s of love-- or what I perceived was love, bubbled out of me in the dead of winter way back then. Yes raging hormones and runaway glands got all mixed up with thoughts of love. Now that I’m an old codger though and those thoughts and urges have greatly diminished, springtime does seem like an aphrodisiac of sorts that’s really not sexual in nature, but I do realize all to well what Alfred was talking about. You see to me, spring is like a new beginning. It’s as if Mother Nature who just last fall put all of her flora and fauna away for a few months just to tease us a little, is now bringing it all back together again, as the trees bud once again, and the grass turns back to green. It’s a time when we replace the smell of the furnace, with the smell of the mother earth.
Each year at this time of the year spring becomes the great precursor for the summer months ahead. The forerunner for yet another round of the lazy crazy days of the season we all rejoice in. It’s the season when projects come off the drawing board and become a reality. A season of flowers, and fruit, and vegetables, and a season of long carefree days in the warmth. There is baseball, fishing and long days at the lake, soaking up sunrises and sunsets. There are baby animals and birds replenishing the ageing stock and insuring the continuation of the species. But first of all must come springtime, the season that ushers it all in and lifts us up gradually from the winter blahs, quietly transitioning us into the summer of sun and fun.
Nowhere on Gods green earth is this change so dramatic as it is right here in the lakes country we all love so much. Maybe its because I’m old and realize that the summers of my life are not infinite that I so look forward to them. That summers in my life are now just a memory, more than a reality. Maybe its because I have learned through the wisdom of life to love so perfectly and that an old mans fancy, compared to a young mans fancy, turns to all of the things he knows makes this world so wonderful, because he has lived them, over and over again.
There will be days in springtime that play with us however. Days that will say, “Not so fast my fickle friend, because summers coming, but winters not quite at the end.” Charles Dickens described it best as, “One of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” Patience is a virtue however and all good things come to those who wait. Virtue can only be described as our moral goodness and something we have to practice and learn. Not just in springtime, but every day of our lives.
Mike Holst
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