The Off Season: Winter has passed, but at a price

By Mike Lunsford
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE March 23, 2008 11:13 pm

— Despite the windy and wooly winter we’ve just had, the brown leaves of a scarlet pin oak I planted in my front yard years ago stubbornly hang in defiance of a spring that is now on our doorstep. They’ll not drop for a while yet. Only when the breezes turn from the south, and we can be outside in shirt sleeves again for good, will the tiny hands of the oak’s new leaves nudge their crunchy neighbors off of the available limb space.
That time is rapidly coming; the weatherman, not always the most accurate harbinger of what’s happening outside our doors, has suggested that a few warmer days are on their way to us again this week, and like last, just a handful of hours of sun has been enough to push the crocuses up through the soil and the maple trees to sprout round, red buds.
Spring may have sprung last week as far as the calendar is concerned, but we all know that winter can still rear its ugly head and take one last bite or two out of us before it’s done. As I write this, it is a gray and drizzly day, the lingering flipside of the green grass and blue sky times that we know are coming. Despite its vindictiveness, I have seen true signs that the winter has now passed and is being swept away like the gravel we’ll push-broom out of our garage doors in spring cleaning.
To me, it seems as though the winter creeps up on us, gradually. I rake leaves for weeks in the fall, hauling them a tarp at a time to dump over our back hillsides. It takes weeks to clean my gutters and replant mums and to put away all of our flower pots and wind chimes and back deck furniture, and I gradually dig long johns and heavy coats and gloves out of my closet on a need-to-use basis.
But spring just happens. One minute, it seems, I am hunkered down into my coat as I walk between car and store, and the next I hear the familiar ping of baseballs being tagged in after-school practices and realize that long-sleeved shirts are a thing of the past. I have already had my left arm haughtily hanging out of my truck window as I’ve headed home from work. In a few days, I’ll be reading box scores on the sports page.
Just today, I noticed that my yard is greening, and doing so in the cool days before a much-maligned forecast of two or three inches of warm spring rain proves true to green it still further. Already, my magnolia tree is thick with a shaggy coat of fuzzy, gray pods that soon will give way to white blooms, then to lime-green leaves. Everywhere, water swirls in brown, muddy ditches and ponds are full to their brims, while scruffy itinerant packs of starlings are congregating in annoying cackling congregations about our yard to talk it all over.
A few days ago, my wife told me she could hear just a solitary peeper frog in the wetlands below our house. He was singing in a party of one, letting his friends, who were apparently still packed and snoozing in the thawing mud, know that they were late in springing their clocks ahead. Yesterday, she heard a choral festival of them; it hadn’t taken them long to hop to the bar and join in.
It is interesting to note that what brought all of this to me was not what I saw out of my windows, but what I saw in our hallway. Near our family room, my wife keeps a baker’s rack on which she sets a menagerie of decorations according to the season at hand. On it now, awaiting cardboard box hibernation, is a collection of snowmen, some stuffed, some felt, others ceramic. She has picked them up over the years on sale tables and for birthdays, and she puts them out just after she has stowed her fall line of pumpkins and leaves and Indian corn.
The always-smiling little guys sit there all winter, wrapped in scarves and coats, and most have snow boots on their toeless feet and winking eyes of make-believe coal. They, and a nearly three foot tall cousin who lives near the doorway of our living room, will soon be stashed away, their warm-weather absence yet another suggestion of the times.
In 1938, Wayne Barlow, a composer who had joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music a year before, wrote “A Winter’s Passed.” Sub-titled “Rhapsody for Oboe and Strings,” it is a short, sad, contemplative piece that was based on two Appalachian folk songs: “A Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” and “Black is the Color of My True Loves Hair.” On the occasional dark winter evening, I have sat at my desk and read or marked papers in the light of a single lamp, listening to Barlow’s melodies. In those times, I have thought that it would take forever for the winter and the cold breeze it stirs up across the stubbled fields by our house to pass. How often I hoped the season would take my space heater and snow shovel and my cracked, chaffed knuckles with it and be gone. Now, it is.
The oak tree that I mentioned earlier: It was just a twig, a less-than-pencil-thin reed, when my daughter brought it home from school 17 years ago. She was nine and in third grade, and like her classmates, she was given a tree of choice to plant for Arbor Day. In my mind’s eye I can still see her as I shoveled a scoop of dirt from the ground. She stood beside me, a watering can in her hands, her feet pinched together at the toes and her hair blowing in the breeze. I remember telling her that oaks grew slowly, so it would be a long time before her tree got very tall. Now, it stands at least twenty-five feet, perfectly broad at its base.
That memory reminds me that a winter’s passing brings another, and another, and another and that their going is not always a good thing.

You can contact Mike Lunsford by email at hickory913@al.com, or through regular mail, c/o the Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.