Welcome, sweet springtime

One of the things that I most enjoy about living in New England is that we (still, for the most part) have four distinct seasons. 

Fall is my favorite: sweater weather, MacIntosh apples, foliage color-riot, a certain melancholy air that has always appealed to me. (As a child, my favorite month was November. I loved the dreary gray of it all, the heat clicking on, trees bare of those foliage-riot leaves (as they were back in the day; now a lot of trees are still wearing o' the green through Thanksgiving).)  

But all the seasons have something to commend them. 

In winter, it's just standing there with a cup of tea, looking out the window, and watching the snow fall. It's flannel PJ's, curling up with a good book, an excuse the make cottage pie. It's the lights on the trees on The Common. (And the greens and wreathes on the doors which, I'm begging you, oh my neighbors, to finally take down. Enough is enough.)

The best thing about summer is the light in the evening. Nothing more is needed to make summer a very good season.

Spring, though, to me is a close second to fall in terms of mi favorito.

And so today, although it's not exactly spring-like yet, I welcome sweet springtime.

New England spring is not exactly perfect. We can have snow in May. We can have cold-wet-rainy right up until June. Sometimes even through June. But the good almost always outweighs the bad.

Spring means daylight savings, which started a couple of weeks ago. And there is nothing better to lift the spirits of those of us who live on the front end of a time zone, where by late fall, it's pitch dark by 4:30. Ugh! When it's dark out, I stay put. When it's light in the evening, I'll often take a stroll - 7:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m. Let there be light!

Spring is forsythia, daffodils, pussy willows, tulips. It's the trees starting to bud and then, one day, as if by magic, they're in full green leaf. 

It's the swanboats - and the gorgeous plantings -  back in the Public Garden. It's Magnolias on Beacon Street. It's baby ducklings. (Unfortunately, it's also baby Canada goslings. They may be cute for starters, but soon enough they're full grown nasty-arse, hissing, crap-everywhere demon creatures.) 

It's baseball. And this year there's even reason to be a tiny bit optimistic about the Red Sox. Glad I bought tickets for the Patriots' Day game, a morning (11 a.m.) outing where the crowd spills out of Fenway right onto the Boston Marathon route. 

And speaking of Patriots' Day, spring means Patriots' Day, one of my favorite holidays. This year is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's midnight ride, the Battle of Lexington and Concord. I do hope that the despicable a-hole in the White House lets his antipathy toward the blue states keeps him golfing in Mar a Lago, rather than defile our celebrations with his malign presence. (There are some Massachusetts towns he might be happy to swan around in, but Boston gave 77% of its vote to Harris. For Lexington the figure was 79%, for Concord 82%. Stay the f home, please.)

Spring is peepers, which even in the city I get to hear. Sometimes.

It's a handful of balmy days in April. (If we're lucky.) And a few more even balmier days in May. (Again, if we're lucky.) It's June when New England weather is usual at its prime. 

When I was in high school, I was a member of the Glee Club. Each year, we put on two concerts: Christmas and Spring.

Our Glee Club was first rate, largely because we had an excellent music teacher, Sister Marita. Marita was very sweet, and we all loved her. (On the bus, coming back from wherever we went on a bus - basketball games, glee club competitions, a performance at the Worcester County Jail, trips into Boston for a museum or "high culture" performance - if Sister Marita was with us, we would always sing, to the tune of Maria from West Side Story, "Marita! I just met a nun named Marita." It was certainly a kinder, gentler time...) Marita (who I believe left the convent shortly after I graduated from high school) was also a perfectionist and exceedingly demanding. And she always managed to choose interesting and diverse works for us to perform. Benjamin Britten "Ceremony of the Carols." "Little Bread and Butterflies" from Disney's Alice in Wonderland. 

Occasionally, however, she picked a clunker, as was the case the year we performed "Welcome, Sweet Springtime" at our Spring Concert. 

At the time - mid-late 1960's - this song seemed so archaic to us, so draggy and dreadful. Something that my grandmother's high school choir might have sung at the turn of the century. (It was written in 1884, so...)

And with spring upon us, it's been an earworm for the last few weeks. So, naturally, I had to google it. And the first thing that came up when I searched for "welcome sweet springtime" was a reference to an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, where the Mayberry gang - Andy, Barney, A(u)nt Bea - were putting on a concert where they were singing none other than "Welcome, Sweet Springtime."  Could this have been the inspiration for Marita's choice? It's definitely the sort of cornball show they would have allowed the nuns to watch, that's for sure. 

Anyway, today it's spring. 

So welcome, sweet springtime. Especially after the winter we just had. 

I know I said that I liked winter, but this winter has been a bit too wintery. The last couple of years, our winters have been mild and rainy, and I've longed for a winter of yore with cold and snow. Be careful what you wish for. While this winter has been much more like the winters we've always had than the last couple of years - albeit with less snow - I've found that my tolerance for old timey winters has dwindled over the years. It was too cold. We didn't get a January thaw. We did get some snow - yay! or at least yay! - but we also got a lot of ice. Which kept me in. One day, I headed out to my volunteer job and got part way there when I saw the sidewalk ahead covered with black ice. I decided that giving out toothbrushes and condoms wasn't worth risking a broken hip, so I went home and spent the day on the inside looking out. 

So, yeah, welcome, sweet springtime.