ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703310013
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
SOURCE: GERRY DAVIES
Spring used to mean bats and gloves and riding my bike with a baseball card flapping in the spokes, making my brother's old Schwinn sound (to a 9-year-old) like a motorcycle. Always, always, the card bore the face of an obscure Philadelphia Phillie. A Billy Champion, a Clay Dalrymple.
Spring meant intoxicatingly warm breezes through newly opened school windows - a distraction from arithmetic that no teacher could entirely subdue. It meant the stimulating freedom of short sleeves and the emergence - surely by magic - of shoots and buds and sprouts where all seemed dead just days before.
Somehow, the air was sweeter, the girls were prettier, life was livelier. Yet it was the same air, same girls, same life as always.
Had to be magic.
In weeks to come the creek would deliver up its tadpoles. Lightning bugs would glow in cupped hands at dusk. Blackberries bulging with juice would fall from bushes into waiting buckets.
Yes, magic.
A magic that I lost a long time ago, though I'm not sure exactly when or where.
Maybe it was when I lived in the big cities, and in the spring the world around me turned from cold and gray to warm and gray.
Maybe it was when money was tight, and the shadows cast by our bills stretched far enough and wide enough to darken the sweetest season with worry.
But spring for me now means ... it's time to tune up the lawnmower. Buy grass seed. Yank out poison ivy (and scratch for a week or so). Clear out the winter's debris. Paint and patch. Weed and cut and plant and weed some more (and more and more).
Worst of all it means beautiful warm days when clearly God's in his heaven and all is right with the world - and I'm sealed in a climate-controlled building and staring into a computer screen.
The room in which I'm writing this doesn't even have a window.
|--| My children know what spring is for. It's for shedding coats and spying birds and climbing trees and picking flowers and playing games in the suddenly, gloriously welcoming grass of our front yard.
My dogs know what spring is for, too. There aren't enough hours in the day to get all the running and barking and digging and smelling done that need to be done.
Not nearly enough.
I think their springs - children and dogs alike - are better than mine.
And this year, now that I've recognized this, maybe I'll go exploring for a bit in theirs.
For a little while one day, I'll sit in the grass when I should be mowing it.
I'll climb a tree just to climb a tree, and leave the pruning shears in the garage.
I'll catch a lightning bug and let it go, and eat blackberries off the bush, and let the weeds live another day.
Happy spring, weeds.
GERRY DAVIES-is a night metro editor of the Roanoke Times. He lives in Blacksburg.
LENGTH: Medium: 66 linesby CNB