The Frozen Toad

On Monday, my brother suggested I read that day’s entry at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, drawn by Greg Perry from Thoreau’s Journal for April 2, 1857:

“A great change in the weather. I set out apple trees yesterday, but in the night it was very cold, with snow, which is now several inches deep. On the sidewalk in Cambridge I saw a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture. Carried it into Boston in my pocket, but could not thaw it into life.”

That’s what I miss most about living in the North – not frozen amphibians but demarcated seasons and the potential for volatility around the cusps. On the day I was born, Oct. 26, 1952, the temperature in Cleveland was 99 degrees. My mother was still in the hospital five days later, on Halloween, when the windows were open in those pre-air-conditioning days and she could hear kids outside trick-or-treating. A few years later, snow fell on my birthday.

In Houston, the seasons blur into sameness. Leaves are always falling but trees are never bare. Except for the odd hurricane, there’s an absence of drama in the cycle of the seasons. Winter in the North creates a sense of urgency about the coming of spring, which arrives on the vernal equinox only on the calendar. Mounds of black snow linger into May. Only then can we relax enough to feel virtuous about having survived another winter. We lust after green, and spring rewards us. Have scholars of climate and religion investigated the reasons for the rise of Protestantism in Northern lands?

The best description of the joy associated with spring in the North comes in the opening scene of My Home is Far Away, the 1944 novel by Dawn Powell, who was born in Mount Gilead, Ohio:

“This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day.”

This scene must be set early in June. The lilacs have passed, the fruit trees are heavy. I recognize details because my second newspaper job was in Bellevue, Ohio, about 80 miles north of Mount Gilead, and each June the town celebrated its Cherry Festival. The shift from spring to summer, rooted in humidity and angle of sunlight, is subtle but perceptible. I believe Thoreau when he boasts he could identity the day without resorting to a calendar, by reading wild flowers and the sun.

Wordsworth, too, conveys the excitement of sunshine and green leaves after six months or more of gray skies and fields. When I read the opening lines of the 1805 version of The Prelude, I remember the luxury of walking outside without a coat, and the giddy anticipation we felt as summer vacation approached:

“O there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome messenger! O welcome friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon city’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.”

Poets and dullards alike, at least in the North, understand that winter is long, spring is short, and summer shorter – especially for kids in school. That rhythm, that expectation of long endurance and brief reward, becomes second nature and takes on an allegorical quality in our lives. We are not made to dwell in Paradise very long. This comes from the “Spring” chapter in Walden:

“The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon.”