Spring Sprang Sprung

Winter again yields to the legion it once put to sleep. Life sparks awake in boggling abundance stretching stiff limbs upward to meet the warm sun. Scurrying and scratching things join others who survived ice and empty stomachs. The wheel turns yet again.

 

Be well. Stay well.

-Sam
 

Happy New Year 2017, Humanity!

Your author. Hard at work unraveling the mysteries of Time Space, Pre-Flood human civilization, ancient human technologies, and Mariah Carey's New Year's Eve performance.

To those of us using the Gregorian Calendar, 2016 recently passed away quietly in its sleep while 2017 was born in a small room down the hall. And from the sounds of it, 2017 has a healthy set of lungs. God help us all.

Where I live in Upstate New York (damn right you capitalize that) it also means winter is done running warm-up laps and is starting to hit its stride for a long run. Many of my fellow Upstaters love this time of year. The waking cries of snowmobiles are carried on crisp air. Handlers examine, spray, tighten, and adjust sleepy motors to coax their memories of joyous sprints across untouched snow. The gods stare in awe as their lightning is pushed it into constructs of metal and dripping hoses blasting cloudless snow onto mountain sides by us fleeting mortals.

I am not a member of that venerated fraternity.

I look forward to the ebbing cold and the stretching daylight. The yawns of Spring and the exhausted, failing breath of Winter call to me. The straining seed and green blade speak my name. Come March, my riding lawn mower paces restlessly in the shed eager for the sharpening of its blades and the running charge against weeds. Pale skin, cadaverous in pallor, longs for the burning kiss of Sol.

Translation: Happy New Year everyone! To all my readers in the USA and around the World, I wish you a pleasantly uneventful 2017. May peace and health and prosperity fall upon you in great abundance.

Be seeing you,
Sam

p.s. 76 days until spring in the Northern Hemisphere!

Thoughts of a Visitor

My father hated winter. The first falling of white would send him into a bee’s dance of endless puttering, planning, and just plain annoyance. Happiness to him was looking over long rows of living green coaxed skyward by the steady push-pull beat of John Deere pistons. Ma once told me if I ever wanted to know what a painter without paint looked like I need only watch Pa when snow covered the ground. Some good did come from those mid-western winters, though. During one long stretch of dull, overcast days Pa gave me his dog-eared copy of The Old Man and the Sea. He read and reread that book for as long as I could remember, but it wasn’t until I read it and felt Hemingway’s sun on my skin that I understood why it called to him. I latched onto Hemingway instantly and he deserves much of the credit for my career in journalism. I sometimes wonder what my biological parents would have thought of seasons. Krypton had none. There is so much about them I’ll never know, but I like to think they would have liked spring. It’s nice to imagine them sharing something in common with Pa. Me? I’m my father’s son. Spring is the best time of year. Especially for flying.