It is springtime in
the South again, and the tulips and redbud and cherry trees are
blooming. The dogwoods that have begun to open are that faint
chartreuse which means they'll be creamy in a few days, and a
few days after that, brilliant, blazing white. They also come
in a pink that my Disney-crazed granddaughter once referred to
as: "pink like the pink of Sleeping Beauty's cloak."
Somehow I am surprised
that at my age I am swept up by a dreamy spring fever every bit
as strong as the ones I suffered when I was a romantic teenager,
or a housebound mother sick of the eternal round of boots and
snowsuits.
Spring is not really
my favorite season, but I welcome it because we humans are attuned
to the rhythms of seasonal change. Their predictability is comforting.
This year in this part
of the country, spring follows a rather relentless winter that
was cold and snowy and felt eternal. The first signs of spring
came on schedule all right, but winter had the nasty last word:
crocuses and jonquils pushed bravely up out of frozen earth, only
to be squelched by a fierce ice storm that brought down telephone,
cable and power lines as well as trees and limbs. One of the latter
fell across the ancient dogwood that stands by my front door,
taking out a large section of the crown. We are waiting uneasily
to see whether the old tree can recover, or will have to be replaced.
During the ice storm,
three days without power found us huddled by the fireplace, wrapped
in blankets and many layers of clothing, candles lit and flashlights
at hand. We winced as branches and small trees snapped and crashed
in the wood that surrounds our house, and leaped from bed when
in the black of night a large limb thumped onto the roof directly
over our heads. Fortunately there was no permanent damage from
it, although its smaller branches were enmeshed in our electric
lines and had to be cut away by the power company several days
later.
At most, the ice storm
was scary and inconvenient for us, and occasioned some heavy yard
work as twigs and limbs were cleared away. The electric thermostat
wouldn't function to ignite our gas furnace, but at least there
was plenty of hot water thanks to a gas water heater, and we could
cook on our trusty gas stove. Even so, we decided that we'd have
made lousy pioneers; we are too softened by all the conveniences
in our lives.
It embarrasses me to
admit how much we missed the television, radio, and other electrical
appliances. I found myself remembering my grandmother's tales
of life in Minnesota in the 1870's, when her mother would entertain
the family of an evening by sitting by the fire and reading aloud
as blizzards howled outside. Sometimes her brother would play
the piano and the family would sing (everyone but Grandabbie,
that is; of eight siblings, she was the only one who couldn't
carry a tune). They lived in a drafty rectory, and when winter
brought -40º nights the three girls slept together in one big
bed for warmth. They often had to break the ice that had formed
in the pitcher on the wash stand before they could pour water
into the basin to wash their faces.
Grandabbie said that
her brothers were always busy, chopping, lugging and stacking
wood, or carrying water from the pump to the kitchen, or taking
care of the cow and the missionary ponies (a pair of horses, really,
but always referred to as "the missionary ponies"). The girls,
too, had to pitch in. The older ones trimmed the wicks and carefully
refilled the oil lamps, and each morning the youngest was given
the job of fetching candles from nightstands in the upstairs bedrooms.
She scraped up any dribbled wax, neatly trimmed the wicks, and
placed the brass candlesticks back on the small table at the foot
of the stairs so that each member of the family would be able
to pick up a candle to light the way to bed. There was a hired
girl to help with the cooking, cleaning and laundry, but Grandabbie
and her sisters were expected to assist her. The older girls did
the ironing (sadiron heated on the wood stove in the kitchen),
and the little one polished the silver, including the napkin rings
that marked who sat where at table. The girls also set the table,
washed the dishes, and did minor chores like sewing on buttons
and stitching up seams split by their five obstreperous brothers.
Until they were old enough to go off to finishing school, their
mother was their teacher, and she was a demanding one.
Being brought up in
a household with my grandmothers, a great aunt and a great uncle,
I was keenly aware of how much easier life was for us in the '40's
and '50's than it had been for them as they grew up in the late
19th century. I loved to listen to the stories of their childhoods,
but I was grateful for the comforts of my own. We may not have
had all of today's conveniences, but we lived in California, not
Minnesota, and we had electricity and running water and central
heat. We had the radio for entertainment, too. My mother tells
me that when my father first turned on the radio, Aunt Martha
got a dreamy look on her face and said: "Just imagine, all these
years, music was floating in the air all around us and we couldn't
hear it until Sr. Marconi made a receiver to catch it." My poor
father didn't even try to explain that prior involvement of a
transmitter was essential; her poetic vision of notes floating
around was just too charming to destroy.
We Americans truly
are spoiled. Much of the world population lives today just as
my grandmother's family did 'way back then, or possibly in an
even more rudimentary fashion.
When the war began
just a couple of weeks after the ice storm, I was brought up short
by the thought of what it must be like to live in Afghanistan
or Iraq these days. No matter what your view of the rightness
or wrongness of the current conflict, the misery it inflicts on
ordinary people is incontestable. The destruction of the infrastructure
of any country is a horrible thing. Our local infrastructure was
out of commission for only a few days after our spring storm.
If sitting in the dark and cold of an ice storm is unpleasant
it is at least not terribly dangerous, and it is temporary. How
unthinkable it must be to sit in your home in the dark and hear
bombs and weapons exploding all around, destroying your way of
life for the foreseeable future, with death or mutilation possible
at any moment.
It is an odd thought
that spring is bound to come to Iraq at its usual appointed time,
no matter what chaos mankind has wrought there. In fact, spring
will no doubt come to some corners of the earth long after humankind
has either blown itself up or evolved into a life form quite different
from the homo sapiens we know today. The hemispheres of
earth will continue to tilt closer to or farther from the sun,
and winter snows will blow and spring blossoms will open on schedule
whether we're here or not.
Our grip on what we
call civilization (with all its creature comforts) is tenuous.
We need to look after it and nurture it and appreciate everything
that has gone into creating it. And we need to start thinking
about how to share our blessings with the rest of the world, before
envy and misunderstandings cause even more misery in the midst
of what should be a perfectly glorious spring.
