It's Spring. Wear a Hat.

I can’t imagine that I haven’t written this same post before. Every year spring wakes me up. Joy and warmth find their way into my old and worn heart, still beating after 64 cold winters. Spring is the same and yet it seems so new. I bet each April I celebrate and write about these same wondrous events. I don’t care if I repeat myself. Spring deserves an annual homage.

I burned my skinny strip of asparagus, which fronts the little vegetable garden by the garage, the Saturday after Easter. I was afraid I’d waited too long and would scorch new shoots of asparagus coming through the dirt under the old dead stalks. I don’t think I did. Each Easter on the farm, or a week before if Easter came late, Mom would go to the tall patch of brown asparagus ferns, matted and brown, between the edge of the garden and the ditch by the blacktop (formerly gravel) road with wooden, strike anywhere farmer matches. We kept Ohio Blue Tips in a tin holder on the kitchen wall. It only took one. She would bury her hands in the asparagus ferns at the edge of the patch and light the match with her fingernail.

“Stand back.”

It burned amazingly fast, bright yellow flames and black smoke. Nothing around it to catch fire, too much moisture in the air and in the ground for it to spread. The fire might spread a little, at most a foot, into the green grass in the ditch, burning the dead grass under the new sprouts, which were unfazed, the green never leaving new blades left standing.

The heat would drive us back further. We stood under the clothesline. Mom was calm in the face of the furious fire. She knew there were no trees nearby to scorch, no wires strung above to melt, the hedge posts holding the woven wire fence would not catch. Nothing to be concerned about. She’d done it many times. Just start the process and watch it complete itself. The asparagus fire was a conflagration, feeding in on itself, multiplying and compounding, heat rushing up and out carrying with it ash and smoke. It roared and crackled. Every spring the asparagus fire was over almost as soon as it started. Flames furiously and quickly ate up those lacy ferns and light hollow stalks. As we watched the fire ebb and the smoke clear we saw that the asparagus had disappeared and a black rectangle, flat to the ground, speckled with white ash, had taken its place. Such rapid change visited the asparagus patch every spring, around Easter. That change comes about in my little asparagus patch still.

We burn the prairie grass too, after cutting it short with a hedge trimmer, in a pile right on the driveway. Fluffy ash is all that is left on the white crushed rock. I burn the Christmas tree. It takes a slow trip sometime after New Year’s Day from the living room to the back yard. It first stops by the bird feeder. When it’s cold and the snow is deep, birds like to go from the feeder to the safety of its branches, getting out of the wind for a while, then going back for more seed. As winter stretches out the green branches dry and go brown. When the snow is gone for good I drag the tree further back by the fire pit by the ravine. One day, hard to determine when, it seems odd to have a dead pine tree lying just off the patio by your bird feeder. Out of place somehow.

Saturday I got out the chain saw and lopped the branches of the Christmas tree off its trunk. It was a fourteen foot Frazier fir. I’ve been buying firs the past ten years or so, sometimes Douglas, sometimes Frazier or something else. Every year I cut off the branches and burn them in the fire pit with the pile of assorted branches that fall off the yard trees during the winter, the boughs from the Christmas wreath we finally make and hang on the garage, and the little wreath my brother Denny and his wife Sandy send us which we hang on the front door. Burning those things marks the official end of winter for the McClures. I keep the Christmas tree trunk to cut up and burn in the fireplace on Christmas Eve eight months away. Funny little traditions. They go on year after year.

I’m careful when I cut off the fir branches. Sometimes I find ornaments. We have a lot and it’s hard to get them all. We’re always so anxious to get that big dry tree and all its needles out of the house. This year I found the little brass trumpet ornament we’ve had for so long and a beaded quetzal I bought in Guatemala. They were there on brown branches, shiny and as good as new. I put them in my pocket and showed them to my wife. She laughed.

I sat on a stump and drank a Lagunitas Little Sumpn’ Sumpn’Ale as I fed branches into the fire pit where we have our wiener roasts. The sun felt as good as the beer tasted. It’s been a while since the sun felt that strong. I should get my Cub hat, I thought. I’ll burn the top of my head.

I looked around. The hostas are pushing up. We have little wild flowers, tiny blue and white blooms scattered around, coming up under the oaks. There are leaves on the lilac bushes. The weeping willow is yellow green. In the front yard by the street peonies are stretching up, nearly four inches high. The circle of surprise lilies is back. It’s like magic. Soon May apples will come up south of the shack. In the yard, things we’ve planted and things we haven’t, and off in the woods wild things, morel mushrooms, random and hidden, respond, each of them, to rain and sun, in any order, and grow, even at night while we sleep. The world is coming alive. Under the ground moles are tunneling, pushing up dirt in long lines. Worms, for some unknown reason, stretch out on the sidewalk and die. Birds that were long gone, some that show up when the worms do, come back. A Northern Flicker picks at the leaves by the shack. It’s spring. We wait so long and it comes so fast.

I put my golf clubs in the trunk. Out on the course for the first time, even without leaves, trees get in the way of my ball and, on some holes, ruin my score. Though all in all it went well. More relaxed it seemed. I avoided the yips on my chips. Think golf is mostly a physical game? Think again. Ask David Duval or Ian Baker Finch. So much of it is in your head. My head slowed down and took its time, uncharacteristically so, during my first couple of rounds. I was able to hit the ball, often but not always, where I intended. I chipped up close to the pin. Amazing. Maybe retirement is finally kicking in.

On Sunday morning I brushed my hair before church and the bristles hurt going over the thin spots. I have to remember to wear that hat. The sun is once again something to be reckoned with. It’s a player, the spring sun is, bringing life back with new found power.

Sunday afternoon we watched the Master’s golf tournament. I explained an important aspect of that tournament’s famed attention to detail to my wife.

“Since they’ve developed lightweight miniature microphones, the tournament people have been capturing birds that live around the golf course down there in Augusta, the ones with the prettiest songs, and gluing tiny microphones to their breast feathers.”

“That” I told her, with a perfectly straight and serious face, “is why you hear the bird’s songs so well during the Master’s telecast, and why they sound so good.”

I paused as she thought about what I had said. I went on.

“The most difficult part turns out to be catching the birds again after the tournament is over and taking that gear off them.”

She believed me for about five seconds. She has known me since 1975 (forty years now?) and I was amazed I was able to fool her even that long. She doesn’t typically like having her mind messed with but she laughed again. I think there is something about spring that makes people want to fool around more. Spring and laughter go together well.

Spring is a good time in the lives of human beings, in addition to plants and animals. Maybe the best time. Get outside and enjoy it. Wear a hat.