Dog Ears

T.S. Eliot began the poem The Waste Land with the lines "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land."

Perhaps he got it just right over in England (was he in England when he wrote that?), but here in Confluence, I've always thought February and March were cruel months themselves. Cruel is a stark term, I'll admit. Makes it sound like these 60 days twist little boys' arms and kick small animals just for spite. Makes you wonder about April in England.

But here is what I mean about February and March: they are dark months. They are the dying embers of winter. The momentum from the holidays and Christmastime and the New Year celebrations are all petered out. Our resolutions are more history than present tense action come February.

School children will know what I'm saying. They've nothing to mark time by. We've had a heavy winter here, and the kids have missed school many days when the roads weren't good enough to drive buses on. That, in turn, eats into the little celebratory vacation days the Confluence school system has built into its calendar--days that all happen in February or March, breaking up the weeks into livable chunks. And just as the groundhog predicts six more weeks of winter, these children now stare down six long, dreary, algebra-filled weeks until any kind of day off whatsoever.

The teachers feel it, too. I've seen them about town, exercising their hopelessness in public. I ran into our second grade teacher, Mrs. Tweetenbaum, at the grocery store the other day. It's interesting what you learn about people based on peering into their grocery carts, an act that feels somewhat voyeuristic, as if you were peeking into their actual pantries. Anyway, there comes Mrs. Tweetenbaum, walking down the bread aisle with a ten mile stare if I've ever seen one. She walked behind her cart with a zombie-like amble, her eyes lost in nightmarish thought of children going stir-crazy from being in school for more than 48 straight days. Christ only had to deal with 40, she thought to herself.

She had filled her buggy with beer, chocolate, and Ritz crackers.

Perhaps this is why the liturgical calendar gives us Lent this time of year. What better way to focus on atonement, the fathers of the church thought, than to do it in a time of natural misery?

I am not a pessimist, though, and I don't think my neighbors and friends here in town are, either (for the most part). Rather, we all wake every morning looking for the first signs of spring--even in the earliest mornings of February.

We take our time turning at the corner of Broad and Green streets, because that's the corner where Miss Owens planted daffodils decades ago. We wait for their green tips to break the earth's frozen crust, rising forward to the sun.

We examine tree tips, looking for their ends to swell with buds. We smell the air. And more than anything, we wait, and wait, and wait. When will spring come?

This weekend was the first in many that didn't start with snow. The temperature, in fact, has risen to a balmy 50 degrees (F). The sun never felt so warm--it was tempting to walk around in shirtsleeves.

I let the dogs out to play, happy for once that they wouldn't come back to the house filthy with snow and mud, and I watched the smallest wander out onto the deck, her golden fur radiant with light, her tiny, book-sized dog ears perking up, her head cocking to the side as she glanced skyward at the trees.

I heard it, too: the chorus of blackbirds above us, thousands of them perched in limbs across a half dozen back yards. A small victory for the soul, and another step toward spring.